§1

A blurred face swam at the end of a tunnel. Croaked like a frog.

‘Is that it?’ said Troy.

‘Is that what?’ said his sister.

‘It, dammit, it. I mean the damn thing cost seventy guineas—is that as good as it gets?’

The man in overalls, crouching behind the set, twiddling with a screwdriver, looked over the top.

‘It’s in its infancy, you know. You can’t expect it to look like the Gaumont, now can yer?’

The face swam fishily, rippling like a moustachioed and unwelcome mirage. Troy recognised him. Gilbert Harding. A figure made by the new medium, a tele-pundit, a man with an opinion on everything, and quite probably the most famous ex-copper in the land.

‘I thought we invented television years ago,’ Troy went on irritably. ‘I thought we led the world in this sort of thing. I thought it was like radar. The stuff of boffins. Barnes Wallis, Logie Baird and all those chaps.’

‘It’s your own fault,’ said Masha. ‘If you’d got one for the Coronation like everyone else, it’d be fine by now.’

‘You’re not saying it takes three years of fiddling and twiddling to get it right?’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘sort of.’

‘Then I don’t want it. Take it back.’

Gilbert Harding stopped wobbling. Troy could hear him clearly for the first time.

‘Am I right in thinking you’re in the pottery industry?’

Applause. A voice off-screen said an utterly unnecessary ‘yes’.

‘Am I right in thinking you’re a saggar-maker’s bottom knocker?’

More applause. A third voice broke in, and the camera cut to a big, curly-headed man with a tough, if pleasing, boxer-like face, smiling genially at an embarrassed nonentity who had at some point thought it would be fun to waste thirty minutes letting four people in evening dress guess his occupation. It struck Troy as being bizarre in the extreme.

The telephone rang and saved Troy from throwing out the chap in overalls or physically assaulting his sister. Life with the goggle-box, he concluded, was not going to be easy.

‘The Branch want to see you,’ Onions said.

‘I don’t work for the Branch.’

‘For Christ’s sake, Freddie, knock it off.’

‘Stan, I don’t have to work for those—’

‘Two of their blokes were killed today,’ Onions said bluntly.

Troy weighed this up momentarily. Carrot or stick? ‘You mean murdered?’

‘No. Car crash on the A3.’

‘Then I don’t see what it’s got to do with us.’

‘It leaves them short. They say they need you.’

‘Why?’

‘Not over the phone, Freddie.’

Troy sighed. He hated this pretence of hush-hush, as though anyone other than Special Branch would be tapping a phone line in England. All the same, if they’d asked for him by name he was intrigued.

‘Just see them,’ Onions said. ‘You don’t have to commit yourself to anything. Just hear them out.’

It was an hour’s drive to Scotland Yard down the Great North Road. Troy was due three more days holiday, but the drive into London had the added draw that it would free him from the attentions of his sisters, who had talked him into buying the goggle-box and would doubtless waste a whole evening talking him through their favourite programmes. If this guessing game was anything to go by, the damn contraption could be stuck in the servants’ hall the minute the sisters left and he need never be bothered with it again. By the time they next suffered a misdirected bout of maternal concern for him, some other fad would have taken its place.

§2

Troy’s Bullnose Morris had expired in 1952 at the age of seventeen. He did not want another. He had liked the car. He had even appreciated the mockery it had elicited in its tattier latter years, but he did not want another. For the first time since the death of his father in 1943 he had blown a portion of his inheritance on an incontrovertible indulgence—a five-litre, six-cylinder Bentley Continental Saloon with Mulliner’s sports bodywork. Long, stylish and fiercely raked at the blunt end, it was a car in a thousand and, as all who knew him had pointed out, utterly un-Troy. The pleasure it gave him to deny familiarity beggared description.

He had the door open and was flinging his old leather briefcase onto the passenger seat when the other sister appeared. Sasha was drifting aimlessly in the spring twilight, clutching a handful of bluebells, humming tunelessly to herself as she approached the drive from the pig pens Troy had built at the bottom of the kitchen garden. She seemed to be in a very different mood from her twin. They read each other as though by telepathy but there appeared to be no rule in twindom that said they should think or feel alike at any one moment. When they did, of course, it was hell for those around them—two bodies with but a single personality, thought and purpose. Sasha was in meditative whimsy, Troy thought.

‘Off so soon?’ she said.

‘The Yard,’ muttered Troy, hoping this would suffice to kill the conversation.

‘That Old Spot’s turned out to be a beauty. Are you going to have her put to the tup this month?’

‘I think you only call them tups if they’re sheep.’

Sasha thought about this as though it were some great revelation, startling to contemplate and worth hours of harmless fun. Troy sat in the driver’s seat and reached for the door, but she put her hand across the top of the frame and emerged from reverie.

‘Oh well . . . are you going to get her fucked by a daddy pig then?’

‘Goodnight, Sasha.’

She let go of the door.

‘Goodnight, Freddie.’

Troy slipped the car into first and let it purr slowly down the drive, the crunch of gravel under-wheel louder than the engine. In his rearview mirror he could just make out Sasha sitting on the steps of the house gazing idly at the moon. He rounded the row of beech trees at the head of the drive and could see her no more. The way ahead clear, he eased out of the gates and set the Bentley racing south towards the London road.

§3

Onions was waiting in Troy’s office, perched on the edge of the desk, back to the door, staring out at the moonlit Thames. He was often to be found this way. As Superintendent in charge of the Murder Squad he had developed the habit of office-hopping. Never, in Troy’s recollection, had Onions once summoned him to his own office. He would drop in, unexpected, uninvited and on occasion unwelcome, at any time of the day and expect to be briefed, or else Troy would arrive to find him hunched over the gas fire pulling on a Woodbine, or as now, watching the river flow. Almost idly, it seemed—but it never was. Onions learned every secret in his squad by rooting around with his nose to the ground. He was adept at reading documents upside down as he talked to you across the desk, and Troy had long ago learnt to leave nothing much lying around unless he felt happy with Onions reading it. Becoming Assistant Commissioner had not changed his habits. Meetings were always held in someone else’s office, information was still gleaned in this haphazard fashion. Troy returned the compliment. On days when he knew Onions was out he would go through his desk, as surely as Onions did his. The result: they had no secrets, except for the secret that they had no secrets.

Onions was bristling. A glimmer of something unknown played about him.

‘Good,’ he said simply as Troy walked in. ‘Good, good.’

Troy took the mood for excitement. Something as yet unspoken was giving him a great sense of anticipation, quite possibly great pleasure. He slipped off the desk. Troy heard the thick, black beetle-crusher boots clump on the floorboards. Onions slid his palms across the stubble that passed for a haircut, as though neatening that which did not exist to be neatened in the first place, and smiled. Troy slung his briefcase onto a chair and stuck his hands in his coat pockets, the merest hint of petulance and defiance in his posture.

‘Are you going to tell me what this is about, Stan? Or do I have to guess?’

‘Ted Wintrincham’s waiting for us in his office right now. Why don’t you give it half a mo’ and let him tell you.’

Troy had no idea what to make of this.

‘Why?’

‘’Cos I think it might amuse you.’

‘Aha.’

‘Oh yes, laddie. In fact, if it strikes you as being half as funny as it strikes me, you’ll be a basket case in ten minutes.’

‘Stan, Special Branch are about as funny as Jimmy Wheeler’s rice pudding joke.’

‘Tell me later. When you’ve heard Wintrincham.’

He smiled in a roguish way that was almost out of character. It seemed from the barely suppressed grin that Onions himself might corpse at any moment. He led off along the corridor. As they mounted the stairs to Wintrincham’s office, Troy fished.

“Who died in the car crash?’

‘Herbert Boyle, and his sergeant. Young chap name of Briggs. Did you know ’em?’

‘I didn’t know Briggs. I knew Boyle. It was hard not to.’

‘Aye. You could never say he didn’t speak his mind.’

‘You could never say he wasn’t the most unconscionable bastard ever to walk the earth,’ said Troy.

‘Jesus Christ, Freddie, the man’s not been dead three hours.’

They arrived at Wintrincham’s door. Onions thrust it open without knocking. Ted Wintrincham was a Deputy-Commander, and head of Special Branch. Much Troy’s superior, but it would never occur to Asst. Commissioner Onions to treat him any differently than he treated any other junior officer. One china shop was much like another to the bull. Wintrincham was seated behind his desk. He rose to shake hands with Troy and make the introductions.

‘Good of you to come so promptly, Chief Inspector Troy. You know Inspector Cobb, don’t you?’

Troy looked at the big man lurching unsteadily to his feet to take his hand as he extended it. He knew Norman Cobb by sight. He was well over six foot, a good sixteen stone, and rather hard to miss. Troy had seen him around the corridors of Scotland Yard for years without ever exchanging a word. He was Troy’s idea of a surly bastard. Well suited to the Branch.

‘I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure,’ said Troy.

Cobb gave him a bone-crunching grip and a brief glimpse of gleaming front teeth in an attempt at a smile. Troy threw his overcoat on the back of a chair and sat down next to Onions, facing Wintrincham. Cobb, Troy rapidly concluded, was cold or just plain huffy, sitting there in his natty blue gabardine mackintosh, buttoned to the neck—like a child sent by his mother to a party he’d determined to hate from the start. Wintrincham was a different kettle. He was the only Special Branch officer Troy liked, the only one with whom he’d pass the time of day without the sensation that he’d just had his pocket picked. He often wondered how the man had risen to the top of his disreputable job. He was a pleasant, friendly countryman. The best part of half a century in London had done little to clip his Hampshire burr, and he still spoke like a rustic and suffered the nickname ‘Farmer’ throughout the Metropolitan Police Force.

‘Ye’ll have heard about Inspector Boyle and Sergeant Briggs, I take it?’

Troy nodded.

‘I hate losing men at the best of times, but this is a bad time. There’s a state visit this week—I’m sure that’s no secret.’

Troy was looking at Onions. Onions looked back. Troy could almost swear he winked. Good God, how could the man sit on information like this and not burst? Suddenly he could see exactly what was animating Onions, could see exactly why he’d played on the element of surprise, could see exactly what was coming.

‘The papers are full of it, after all,’ Wintrincham went on. ‘First Secerterry Khrushchev and . . . ’ave I pronounced that right, d’ye reckon?’

He was looking to Troy for an answer. Troy was almost at a loss for words.

‘Perfect, sir,’ he muttered.

‘Anyway. First Secerterry Khrushchev and Marshal Bulganin will be docking at Portsmouth in the morning and disembarking tomorrow a.m. I’ve been asked to provide the bodyguard, and I gather it’s a matter of principle that the bodyguard should consist entirely of serving police officers. There’ll be the usual security arrangements—motorcycle escorts made up by the Met divisions—but the personal bodyguard will be Special Branch. Boyle and Briggs were on their way to Portsmouth when they were killed. It leaves me two men short. It would seem that you are the only available officer who meets the necessary requirements. You’ve good Russian, I’m told.’

‘Perfect, sir,’ Troy said again.

‘I know it’s unusual to ask to second an officer of your rank, and I appreciate you’ve a squad of your own to run, but under the circumstances I’d be very grateful if you’d agree to help us out in this matter.’

‘A week’s secondment, I take it?’

‘More like ten days. Mr Onions is willing. If you’d like a little time to . . . er . . .’

‘No, no,’ said Troy. ‘I’m sure Mr Onions has already said all he needs to on the matter.’

Troy shot Stan a sideways glance, but he refused the bait and stared at the end of his boot.

‘But I’d like the opportunity to put a few questions to you if I may. Who, for instance, is in charge of the operation?’

Cobb’s voice cut in from the corner. ‘I am.’ It was guttural, flat and Midlands, and he coughed into his hand as soon as he had spoken, as though reluctant to exercise his voice more than the minimum.

‘I see,’ said Troy. ‘How many men do we have?’

‘Five,’ he grunted again. ‘Six with you. Working in double shifts. Four with Khrushchev. Two on two off. Two with Bulganin. Same method. You’d be with the Marshal, and you could have the night shift. Less for you to do. Leave the important stuff to my lads. They’re trained for it, after all.’

This irritated Troy. He knew damn well that Special Branch training amounted to no more than matriculation in steaming open envelopes and kicking down doors. Any fool could do that.

‘It doesn’t sound as though I’ll be needing much Russian,’ he said.

‘A precaution,’ said Wintrincham. ‘Of course, they’ll bring their own translators. But it’s been decided in another place that perhaps it would be better if everyone in regular contact with them spoke the language. That way nothing slips by.’

Another place. If the man meant MI6, why didn’t he say so? Good God, could no one call a spook a spook any more?

‘Slips by?’ Troy said softly.

‘Anything . . . shall we say . . . anything of importance. Anything you hear that might be important would be reported back to Inspector Cobb. And I need hardly add that as far as the Russians are concerned we’re all coppers, and they’ve no reason to think we speak their language.’

‘Other than their natural suspicion,’ Troy said.

‘Can’t bargain for that. All I’m saying is if you keep your mouth shut and your ears open, the job should be no trouble to anyone.’

Troy looked again at Onions to find him looking back. In for a penny, he thought.

‘Let me see if I understand you, sir,’ he began, using a well-tried opening of understated, deferential defiance. ‘You want me to spy on Marshal Bulganin?’

‘Not exactly . . .’

‘Ted,’ Onions cut in. ‘What else would you call it?’

‘I don’t know whether you’re aware of this, sir,’ Troy went on, ‘but less than ten years ago when I arrested an agent of the American Government on four counts of murder—four counts on which he was subsequently convicted—officers of this department sent me to Coventry. The sole exception was the late Inspector Boyle, who called me a traitor to my face. I wonder also, sir, if you’re aware that when we, every man jack of us, were vetted during the war, my vetting was, as Chief Inspector Walsh put it, marginal. A condition of which this department has felt it necessary to remind me from time to time when it’s suited its own purposes to portray me as less than wholly loyal to the interests of the force. Am I to take it that my credit with this department has risen? Am I now, after so much water under a dozen bridges, being asked to spy on a Marshal of the Soviet Union?’

Wintrincham was stunned to silence. It occurred to Troy that he could scarcely be accustomed to being addressed in this fashion—the daily routine of Onions and Troy—by his own men. He was almost sorry. Wintrincham was behaving decently and giving him a choice, but the game was too rich to resist.

‘Because,’ Troy concluded, ‘I won’t do it.’

Wintrincham was looking to Onions to bail him out, but it was Cobb who spoke.

‘Excuse me, sir, we don’t have to take this shit. We can do very well without Mr Troy.’

‘Hear the man out, Inspector,’ Onions said.

‘I rather thought Mr Troy had said his piece and shot his bolt, sir.’

‘Shut your gob, lad. He’s not through. Are you, Freddie?’

Troy was silently in awe of the timing. It amounted almost to telepathy. And the use of his Christian name amounted to sanction for anything he might now say.

‘No, sir. I did have one more point to make.’

Cobb rolled his eyes at the ceiling. Troy thought he heard a whispered ‘Jesus’.

‘I won’t spy on Marshal Bulganin.’

‘I told yer,’ muttered Cobb.

‘But I will spy on Khrushchev.’

Cobb and Wintrincham looked at each other blankly. Troy looked at Onions, sitting there with his arms folded and smirking. Troy had often thought that he had no more liking for the Branch than he did himself. That the Branch was now under his command was simply a result of running C Division of the Yard. Troy could not believe this aspect of the command gave him any pleasure.

Wintrincham spoke at last. ‘Who,’ he asked Cobb, ‘have you assigned to Khrushchev?’

‘It was Inspector Boyle. As things are, I was going to take him myself, sir. It’s my operation.’

‘I don’t want the operation. I just want Khrushchev. Preferably while he’s awake. You’d be wasting me on Bulganin,’ said Troy.

‘What makes you think that?’ Cobb snapped back at him.

‘Where did you learn your Russian, Mr Cobb?’

‘In the army. 1946.’

‘I’ve spoken Russian all my life. It’s my first language. Besides, compared to Khrushchev, Bulganin is taciturn. If you have to think what Khrushchev says once he gets on a roll he’ll leave you standing. He’s quick and he’s bad-tempered. And when he loses it, he talks nineteen to the dozen. Can you honestly tell me that you have anyone else as fluent as me?’

Cobb stared back at him silently.

‘Are those your terms, Mr Troy?’ Wintrincham asked.

‘Not terms, sir. I wouldn’t dream of setting conditions on my service. I’m simply trying to be practical.’

‘I don’t think I believe you, Mr Troy. But it remains nevertheless that what suits your vanity is probably what suits the operation best. I’ll assign you to First Secerterry Khrushchev.’

Cobb opened his mouth to speak, but Wintrincham got in first.

‘Whatever your objection is, Norman, I don’t want to hear it. I’ve made my decision. It’s still your command. You’ve enough decisions of your own without wasting time questioning mine. If you’ve any orders for Chief Inspector Troy, issue them now and I can bugger off home to bed. It’s been a long day.’

Cobb coughed into his fist. He looked up at Troy with undisguised contempt.

‘Report to the garage at 6 a.m. We drive to Portsmouth for a briefing in the dockyard and weapons issue at nine-thirty. I’ll pair people off then and issue rosters. We wait for the Russian ship and meet the visitors at disembarkation. Back up to London by train. Formal meeting at Waterloo by HMG. And the evenings are mostly black tie—you do have evening dress, don’t you, Mr Troy?’

Well, thought Troy, he had to have his little dig one way or another, didn’t he?

§4

Back on their own landing, out in the corridor, Troy could not resist the cat-that-got-the-cream grin. Onions responded. A cheery display of nicotined teeth. For a moment he thought they’d both corpse. Onions was right, it was rich; it was irresistible, it was funny.

‘What was the gag?’ Onions said.

‘Eh?’

‘Jimmy Wheeler and the rice pudding.’

‘I only meant it’s not funny. Everybody’s heard it. Wheeler cracks it every time he appears. Like Jack Benny playing the violin.’

‘Funny?’ Onions mused. ‘I don’t think I’ve heard it.’

Troy thought that Onions must be the only man in Britain who hadn’t, but then he probably did not go out much, never went to the cinema or the variety and had probably never seen television in his life. For all Onions knew, Charlie Chaplin still wore a bowler hat and baggy pants, and Martin and Lewis was a department store.

‘Tramp calls at the door of the big house. Toff opens the door. Tramp says, “Evenin,’ guvnor. Could you spare a tanner or a bite to eat?” “Well,” says the toff, “d’you like cold rice pudding?” “Great,” says the tramp, and the toff says, “Well, come back tamorrer, it’s hot now.”’

Onions thought about this for a moment or two, as though puzzled.

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘It’s not funny.’

§5

There was scarcely enough of the evening left to do anything but go home, pack and go to bed. It was a short walk from Scotland Yard to his town house in Goodwin’s Court. Over the years Troy had worked out and walked every possible route home. Along the Embankment, under Hungerford Bridge, up Villiers Street, across the Strand and in the back way via Chandos Place and Bedfordbury—which was rivery and, on the whole, quiet. Or straight along Whitehall, across Trafalgar Square, miss Nelson, pass St Martin-in-the-Fields, up St Martin’s Lane and in the front way—which was far from quiet and for when he was in the mood to play the tourist. Or, as tonight, in mood perverse, over Whitehall, down Downing Street, where the lights still burned in the Prime Minister’s offices—last-minute alterations to the agenda allowing Mr K to visit a pickle-bottling factory in Middlesbrough or morris dancing in Middle Wallop?—where the duty copper gave him an unexpected salute, out into Horse Guards’ Parade, up the steps at Carlton House, up the Haymarket, and left into Orange Street—there to pause, to gaze quickly up at the top floor of an old, narrow house, and walk on, out into Charing Cross Road, through Cecil Court and in the front way.

When he got in the telephone was ringing.

‘Freddie? Come out and have a jar.’

Why Charlie? Why now?

‘Bad timing, Charlie, I’m off somewhere at first light. I have to pack.’

‘I’m only in the Salisbury. I saw you pass by. Come on. Just half an hour.’

‘Charlie, it’s half past—’

‘Since when did we give a toss about the time?’

The Salisbury stood on the far side of St Martin’s Lane, opposite the entrance to Goodwin’s Court. In the heart of the West End, all but sandwiched between theatres, it was a popular watering hole of actors. And, of a kind, Charlie was an actor.

Troy found him in the tap room, swirling a brandy and soda, a thousand trivial questions on his lips, his glistening, tangled web stretched out for Troy to settle into. Troy had known Charlie for thirty years. He was a matter of days older than Troy. They had started at school the same day, in the same dormitory, and had lived side by side for nearly eight years through the vicissitudes of an education that Troy had hated. Charlie had more tolerance of it, more understanding, Troy had assumed, of what it all meant. He had steered Troy through the course of it, around social and formal obstacles that left Troy baffled and wondering vaguely if the English were not a race of lunatics. All the same, each summer Troy asked his father if he could leave now, and each summer the elder Troy replied that he would never come to terms with the new country any other way and so must stay. ‘Do you want,’ he said, ‘to be an Englishman or not? I recommend it wholeheartedly. They can be so unforgiving to wogs of any kind. If the club has opened its doors, I suggest you join. You don’t have to believe. That is, after all, un-English. Remember Conrad—Under Western Eyes. They made their compromise with history long ago, and so believe nothing. And you don’t have to like them either.’

Charlie led. Whatever the situation, Charlie led and Troy was an NCO. The benefits to Troy were great. At first he had wondered why Charlie had picked him, since more often than not he needed protecting from the perils of a closed society that he scarcely understood. And the price to Charlie had been great. He had stood up to bullies, with whom he personally had had no quarrel but for whom Troy, foreign in his looks and short in stature, was a natural target. And on more than one occasion had taken a beating meant for Troy.

‘I don’t feel it as you would,’ he had said when Troy asked why he had owned up to whatever it was Troy had done. Troy did not for a moment believe this, and said as much. Charlie replied, ‘Well, let’s put it another way. They hit me a damn sight less hard than they would have hit you. They know you’re not one of them; they think I probably am. But they’re wrong. Contra mundum, Fred. You and me against the world.’

Troy had not understood this. All the same, Charlie had gone on saying it.

In its way their education had shaped each of them into what they were now. Each found a home outside the norms of English high society. Charlie had gone up to Cambridge in 1933, from there straight into the Guards, in which he spent the war. In theory at least he was still in the Guards, but this was all part of the colossal bluff that Troy thought went back to the war and perhaps to before the war. Guards meant spook, reserve meant active spook, attachment to our embassy in Helsinki meant important spook, attachment to our embassy in Moscow meant very important spook. All this went without saying. Charlie and Troy did not discuss it, had never discussed it. There was little need. Few men alive had Charlie’s gift for small talk.

‘How are the girls?’ he asked, beaming his faultless smile at Troy.

‘Not bad at all. They’re forty-five now, and when I can struggle free of them long enough to be faintly objective, I’ll admit they’re good-looking women.’

‘And Sasha? How’s Sasha? I always had a soft spot for her.’

This was a lie. Passable enough, plausible enough if uttered to anyone else, but to Troy it smacked of Charming Charlie. At school some wag whose facility with words was as good as his perception had dubbed him Princess Charming. It reflected Charlie’s good manners, his good nature, his sexual proclivities, his ready flattery and the inevitable result—Charlie usually got his own way. Six feet tall in his stockinged feet, a mop of unruly blond hair that seemed to roll down his brow just short of the cuteness of curls, a pleasing heart-shaped face, pale blue eyes and good, un-English teeth set in a wide mouth, Charlie had found himself a social success from an early age. Troy had seen him grow from a pederast’s delight to the perfect ladies’ man. In many ways he and Troy were opposites but, as the years had proved, enduring friends. Charlie lived recklessly, was always broke, and seemed to lurch from crisis to crisis untouched by the clammy hand of chaos. Troy had a vivid memory of the last time he had lent him money three or four years ago, if only because it was the last time and because, for the first time, Charlie had paid him back. Three hundred quid in used flyers, and a crystalline lie about having backed the winner in the Grand National. Prior to that, Troy had paid off bad debts, settled tailors’ bills and seen off menacing bookmakers with a disheartening regularity and, the charm working like magic, no real resentment that he could remember. Time was, Troy thought, Charlie could talk his way in or out of anything.

‘No you didn’t,’ said Troy. ‘Nobody could. I can tell them apart physically. I always could. But I defy anyone to drive so much as a playing card between their characters. They’re both the same, and they’re both as bloody-minded as they come. The idea that you could have a preference for one over the other isn’t on, and the idea that any man could seriously have a soft spot for either one of them is preposterous. Even their wretched husbands can’t aspire to that.’

Charlie grinned. ‘How is dear Hugh?’

Sasha had married the Hon. Hugh Darbishire in 1933. He was an English upper-crust bore, far from brainless but safely, absolutely contained by the mores and interests of his class. Troy’s father had remarked on the announcement of their engagement that no one should ever doubt what to buy Hugh as a present—shirts for him to stuff. ‘Wretched’, Troy knew, was scarcely fair. Hugh was probably as happy as one of Troy’s pigs, for much the same reasons. He was blind to his wife’s eccentricities and took immense pride in telling people what a marvellous wife and mother she was. On a good day, Troy thought, Sasha could just about remember her children’s names. Last year Hugh’s father had died and Hugh had gone to the Lords as the Viscount Darbishire. He had broken with his family’s Liberal tradition and sat for the Conservatives. Hugh and Troy’s elder brother Rod had not spoken since the day he called the family together to announce this. Rod had called him a ‘chinless wonder’, to which Hugh had weakly protested with an ‘I say’, which Rod had capped with, ‘And you’re a fucking idiot, too.’

‘Charlie, you didn’t get me here to chew the fat about Hugh.’

Charlie beckoned the barman and ordered another brandy and soda.

‘No,’ he smiled. ‘Of course I didn’t. I just wanted to say that you don’t have to do it.’

‘Do what?’

‘You don’t have to go to Portsmouth.’

Troy was perplexed.

‘I don’t?’

Charlie shook his head vigorously, then swept an overlong lock of blond hair from his face.

‘It’s my shout. The whole damn shebang is down to me. I only found out the Branch had roped you in about quarter of an hour ago. Honestly, you don’t have to do it. It wasn’t on for those buggers to go twisting your arm like that. If they didn’t nurse the illusion of their independence so jealously and had asked me first, I’d have told them not to bother.’

It was the first admission Charlie had ever made to being a member of the Secret Service. But Troy had already made up his mind. Of course the Branch were a pain in the arse. He hated Special Branch even more than he hated spooks, but nothing on earth would now dissuade him from the prospect of spending a week in the company of Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev.

‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s OK. Honestly. I’ve told Wintrincham I’ll do it and I will.’

‘We don’t need you. Really we don’t.’

‘I rather think you do. Where else are you going to find a Russian speaker as good as me? Outside your own ranks, that is. And of course you’ve been told to stay out of it, haven’t you?’

‘Do you really think Khrushchev is going to be indiscreet in front of a British bobby?’

‘I haven’t a clue. But you must think it’s worth the chance or you wouldn’t have surrounded him with paid ears, would you? Where will you be?’

‘Out of it. I’ll be in London. And if Cobb doesn’t keep me posted I’ll have his bollocks for conkers. If any of the Comrade First Secretary’s men spotted me there would be a bit of a rumpus. How did you know we’d been warned off, by the way?’

‘It’s buzzing around the Commons. My brother remarked on it only a couple of days ago. Said the word had come from the top.’

‘He’s right. I got the works. Meeting with the PM himself. Five and Six to go nowhere near the old boy, or else.’

Yet more admissions, thought Troy. Charlie would hardly be summoned to meet Eden if he himself were not somewhere near the top of the spook’s greasy pole.

The barman appeared over Charlie’s left shoulder. Placed a brandy and soda in front of him, but spoke directly to Troy.

‘’Scuse me, Mr Troy. Friend o’ yours in the back room. Askin’ for you.’

‘Johnny?’ Troy asked.

‘’Fraid so.’

‘Drunk?’

‘Arseholed, Mr Troy. If you wouldn’t mind. He is askin’.’

Troy got up. Charlie followed. The back room at the Salisbury was beautiful; a plush red box, a sumptuous crimson hole, a velvet glove in which to drink and dream. The man called Johnny was face down on the table, moaning softly.

‘How did he know I was here?’ Troy said.

‘If you ask me, it’s second sight. Like how does he always know who’s just been to the bank, and how does he know which night the guvnor’ll be round askin’ to clear ’is slate.’

The man pushed himself slowly upright, his hands against the edge of the table. His black cashmere coat and his matching red scarf—the nearest thing to a toff’s mufti—were spattered with vomit. He reeked of whisky. Wafts of it floated across at them as he burbled.

‘Freddie, Freddie me old cocksparrer. Pissed again, eh?’

Troy put a hand under his arm and jerked him to his feet. Charlie took the other arm, and the barman grabbed a brown trilby off the hatstand and rammed it down on Johnny’s head.

‘Home, Johnny,’ Troy said simply, and the two of them lugged him through the front bar to the street door.

‘Can’t,’ he was burbling. ‘Just can’t, can’t seem to get over it. D’y’knowwhatahmean?’

Charlie looked questioningly at Troy, but Troy had no time for the unspoken question.

‘Flag a cab,’ he told him.

‘Freddie, me old mate,’ Johnny went on, ‘there are times when all you want . . .’ He paused to belch loudly. ‘When all you want is just to be, just to be . . . dammit just to be able to talk to her. You know, you must know. For Christ’s sake you’re the only one who does.’

Charlie had bagged a cab. The driver pulled over to the kerb, looking doubtfully at the way the drunken lord sprawled across Troy.

Troy tipped Johnny into the back seat, prised his hands away and got the door shut on him.

The cabbie was leaning out of his window, neck craning backwards, eyes full of suspicion.

‘Where to, guv?’ he asked.

‘Lowndes Square,’ said Troy.

Then the back window came down and Johnny’s head lolled out.

‘Soon, old chap, soon, whaddya say?’

Charlie pointed south towards Trafalgar Square with his thumb. A long wail of Troy’s name trailed after the cab as it shot away down St Martin’s Lane.

Troy and Charlie stood facing each other on the pavement, neither making a move to go back inside.

‘Friend of yours?’

‘Johnny, thirteenth Lord Enniskerry, tenth Viscount Lissadell, ninth Marquess of Fermanagh, and well-known piss artist,’ Troy recited.

Charlie looked at his shoes, then back at Troy.

‘I see,’ he said. ‘Diana Brack’s brother.’

He paused. Glanced back down the street after the cab.

‘I wouldn’t have said he’d make a natural friend.’

‘Killing his sister isn’t part of the equation. If the truth be known, I’d say Johnny was devoted to Diana. But in killing her I destroyed his father. And if there really is something the ninth Marquess and I have in common, it’s a hatred of the eighth Marquess. I’m sorry, Charlie, but this puts a damper on the evening. If you’ll forgive me I’m just going to stagger home to bed. I have to be up with the birds anyway.’

‘You’ll be OK?’

‘Of course. I’ve put Johnny to bed pissed out of his brain dozens of times. I’ve listened to his drivel about his sister and his father more times than I could ever count. Always leaves its mark, but nothing I can’t handle.’

Charlie hugged Troy. A quick embrace, with enough backslap to pass for rugged and manly. It was the sort of thing Troy hated, but it was Charlie through and through and he had long since learnt not to flinch from Charlie’s promiscuous, public emotions. Troy had, he rarely thought, loved only four people in his life: his father, long dead; Diana Brack, also long dead, shot by Troy himself in the last year of the war; one Larissa Tosca, long since vanished; and Charles Leigh-Hunt. It would be foolish in the extreme to lose what little he had left.

He crossed St Martin’s Lane, cursed Johnny Fermanagh for his lack of timing, and went home. Within ten minutes he knew that Johnny had ruined a good night’s sleep and with it the prospect of an early night. Troy would not sleep. Sleep brought only the prospect of the same repetitive nightmare; the same which played itself out in his head a thousand times, in a thousand variations, but with only one ending.

He had been recently in Portsmouth—three days spent on a murder investigation in February. A pimp strung up from a lamppost by his tie, and the killer had hung onto his feet till the poor sod had strangled. Troy had stayed at a pleasant enough hotel only walking distance from the naval dockyard—the King Henry, run by a retired dockyard policeman. It was only a quarter to ten. If he threw a few things into an overnight bag and got a cab to Waterloo, he could be there by midnight or perhaps twelve-thirty at the outside. It would distract him from the headful of nonsense that Johnny Fermanagh had given him, and with any luck he might be ready for sleep when he arrived. Better still, he’d be able to lie in till seven or thereabouts. He called ahead.

‘You’re in luck, Mr Troy,’ said ex-Sergeant Quigley. ‘We got just the one room left. I’ll be up till one meself. Always stock the bar before I goes to bed. Just bang good and hard on the door.’

Out in the street Troy flagged a cab. As he sat back in the seat, and the cabbie waited a moment for traffic to pass, the door of the Salisbury swung open and Charlie came out. He yawned, stretched, buttoned his coat, swung his scarf around his neck and disappeared down Cecil Court. Troy watched him go, wondering at the distance that time had placed between them, wondering how well you could know any man whose entire life was bound up with lies, and thinking that Charlie knew Troy, now, infinitely better than Troy knew him or could know him. It pained him. As boys they had had no secrets, even to the details of Charlie’s vigorous queer love life; as young men they had had few secrets, even to the details of Charlie’s gargantuan consumption of women. Now he told Troy little. And for once it dawned on him how little he had ever told Charlie of his affair with Diana Brack. But then, he had never told anyone. Far easier was it to own up to killing than to loving. Young Fermanagh had rubbed this home in one drunken fit by quoting Oscar Wilde’s piece of appalling doggerel on the subject: ‘We each one kill the thing we love.’ It was quite possibly the only piece of verse Johnny knew by heart, and he had failed utterly to work out whether it was the brave man who had the sword or the other chap, and was undoubtedly well-meant; but right now Troy could do without such platitude. He closed his eyes and asked the driver to tell him when they reached Waterloo.

§6

Quigley had a perverse flair for melodrama. His rambling, twisted, late-Tudor dockside inn had seen countless additions and changes, amongst which was electricity in the bedrooms. Not, however, in the corridors and landings, along which Quigley led Troy by the sweeping, sputtering glare of a kerosene lamp, arm held high, shadows leaping from wall to wall, less like a retired copper and more like a ham auditioning for the part of Long John Silver.

‘You made it just in time. Another two minutes and I’d’ve barred the door and called it a day.’

Pieces of eight, thought Troy. ‘Good of you to stay up,’ he said.

Quigley thrust open the door to a vast barn of a room and pointed across the wildly sloping floor to the comfort and welcome of a half-tester bed, already turned down, inviting Troy to a sleep he fervently hoped would be dreamless. He dropped his case and sloughed off his coat, hoping Quigley was not in the mood for chat.

‘Early breakfast, you said?’

‘Seven-thirty, if that’s not too—’

‘Fine, fine, Mr Troy. One o’ my girls’ll be serving. Mary, my youngest. You’ll remember her. We’re pretty full tonight. Lots o’ them reporter chappies down from Fleet Street to snap those Russkis tomorrow. Not that any o’ them’ll be up with the lark. I’ve one other early call. Salesman chappie from up north somewhere. So it’ll be no trouble.’

Quigley paused. The obvious had occurred to him.

‘I don’t suppose that’s got anything to do with your own visit, Mr Troy? Russkis an’ all?’

Troy smiled and said nothing. Whatever answer he gave would only be to invite Quigley to natter, and he desperately wanted his bed. Quigley took the hint. Troy heard the floorboards creak all the way back down the corridor. The wind rose suddenly and he felt the room shake and the old oak flex under the strain like a mast in a storm.

Pieces of eight, he thought, and fell gratefully into the half-tester.

In the morning he woke early and stared at the light slanting in through the curtains. It could not be later than six-thirty; he could hardly have slept more than five hours. He closed his eyes again and the dream flooded back in on him, the searing images of Diana Brack: stalking him across a wasteland, gun in hand; curled sleeping in the crook of his arm; stretching, yawning, naked at the foot of his bed. His eyes snapped open. He threw back the sheets, bumped onto the drunken floor, and cursed Johnny Fermanagh once more.

In the dining room a flustered Mary Quigley met him. A dozen tables stood piled with chairs and in the midst of them one had been set for breakfast. A small man in a blue blazer sat with his back to them, his right elbow working vigorously.

‘You won’t mind sharing, will you?’ Mary asked. ‘Only I’m way behind this morning and as there’s just the two of you, it does save setting two tables and running between them like a scalded cat. I’ll be doing enough of that when those randy buggers from Fleet Street stir their stumps. Bottom pinchers the damn lot of ’em.’

Put like that, Troy could hardly say no. Of course he didn’t want to share. Breakfast was the most private meal of the day. Selfish beyond reproach. His father had always risen early to be sure of taking it alone. His mother had always breakfasted in her bedroom. And the children ate with the cook, under strict instruction that they could not talk to their father until after his third cup of coffee and his second newspaper. He couldn’t remember when he last shared breakfast with anyone.

The man in the blazer paused in his porridge to offer a hand to Troy.

‘Cockerell,’ he said. ‘Arnold Cockerell.’

Troy shook the hand, which instantly resumed its porridge-shovelling, and sat down.

‘Troy,’ he said. ‘Frederick Troy.’

‘Gentleman of the press?’ Cockerell queried, through his last mouthful of oats.

Troy had no ready lie. He heard, felt, the clank of cup and saucer, felt the splash of two sugars and the rattle of the spoon as Cockerell stirred his tea in the silence of Troy’s own making. The last thing he’d ever thought he’d need was an alibi. What was he doing in Portsmouth at seven o’clock of a Wednesday morning?

‘No, no,’ he muttered. ‘Just a bit of a break really.’

Pathetic, especially for a man whose profession necessitated practised skill with lies, but Cockerell seemed satisfied with the answer.

‘All right for some,’ he said, and Troy knew he was off the hook, knew what was coming next. With any luck all he’d have to do would be to nod occasionally through the clichés.

‘I’m in sales myself,’ Cockerell began. ‘Just another working day for me, another early start. Still, it’s the early bird catches the worm.’

Mary appeared at the table, balancing a large wooden tray bearing porridge and a pot of coffee for Troy and, almost beyond belief, a plate of kedgeree for Cockerell. The man’s digestion, Troy thought, must be Edwardian. Who in hell could stomach porridge and kedgeree? For all he knew the man had started with a plate of devilled kidneys and worked his way down the menu.

‘Dad says to give you coffee not tea. On account of how you never drunk the tea last tune you was ’ere,’ said Mary. She plonked the pot in front of Troy and was gone. Troy poured himself a cup and, as the aroma of a good dark roast wafted up, said a silent thank-you that Quigley knew how to make decent coffee. Cockerell had started on his plate of kedgeree. Troy hoped it might shut him up.

‘During the war,’ Cockerell sallied forth with a beginning Troy had long ago come to dread as a preface to whatever rubbish might follow. ‘During the war . . .’

The phrase rattled around in Troy’s brain. It stood for a certain type of man, a particular, though hardly peculiar, breed of Englishman. ‘During the war’—a phrase of constant anticipation, heralding hours of harmless fun, yard upon yard of interminable reminiscence about the way things were. ‘During the war’—Troy looked across the top of his cup at the bearer of this piece of traditional English nonsense, wondering if he’d be true to type or if, by some God-given miracle, he might just be a variation that he hadn’t encountered in the eleven long years of constant nostalgia since the war in question had ended.

Cockerell was off on some train of his own about the ‘Yanks’ and ‘over here’ and how they always drank coffee and not tea and how he’d never understood how anyone could start the day without a good cup of the leaf. Troy was not listening. He heard Cockerell’s words through gauze and cotton wool, but he saw the man quite clearly for what he was. Ever since the war, the English had rehashed it endlessly. Many of those who survived the bombs and bullets had been destroyed by blue blazers with badges. They could be found across the length and breadth of the nation. Propping up bars in RAF clubs and the British Legion. Yarn spinners and bluffers whose greatest hour had been square-bashing in Inversquaddie or nipple-greasing at RAF Cummerbund, whose lives ever after would be in sozzled thrall to this one moment. Men who had foundered on the rock of a pointless nostalgia for the good old days, which, if viewed objectively, had to be counted amongst mankind’s darkest hours. Troy found them to be hopeless bores.

Cockerell’s badge had no inscription, but from the coils of rope twisted around what might be an anchor, Troy deduced that he had whiled away the apocalypse in the Royal Navy. Clerk in charge of stores, perhaps? Mess waiter? He looked at the weaselly face opposite him. A narrow skull, a pointy jaw and a pencil-thin moustache. A familiar enough face. A face to be seen in a thousand pubs anywhere in the British Isles. One to be avoided like the plague. Troy put him down as a former petty officer, shore-based, whisky drinker, Senior Service smoker, and probably wearer of suede shoes. He was almost tempted to risk a dropped table napkin to confirm the latter point when it dawned on him that Cockerell was looking at him in a manner that indicated he was waiting for Troy to speak. If he’d asked a question, Troy hadn’t heard him.

‘Tell me,’ Troy fudged. ‘What exactly is it that you sell?’

The man beamed. Troy had just pulled the cracker for him. He paused in his kedgeree, wiped a fleck of boiled egg yolk from his bottom lip, rested an elbow on the table, and shone with pride and self-esteem.

‘Modern furniture,’ he said, so softly as to be almost reverential. ‘Tomorrow’s look. The settee of Mrs 1960 in your lounge today.’

Good grief, Troy thought. What hath God wrought?

‘We’re a stuffy old country,’ Cockerell was saying. ‘We do so like to cling to the past. Do you know most families in England today have never bought a three-piece suite? Never! We all live with the junk our parents hand down. Most homes you go into are still using furniture bought in 1925 at a tanner a week on the knock. We’re living in the past. Europe’s leaving us standing. I mean, is this what we won the war for?’

Troy had no idea why we had won the war. At the time it had seemed to him a marvellous stroke of good fortune. All the same, he was damn certain it wasn’t won simply to facilitate the purveying of second-rate tat in the dubious name of modernity. He knew what Cockerell meant by ‘modern’—coffee tables on black tapered legs, sticking out at odd angles, and hideous carpets with patterns looking like Jackson Pollock’s rejects. But then, he had never bought an item of furniture in his life. His mother had furnished his house, entirely with odds and sods from her own. He was, he supposed, part of what Cockerell was getting at. What he called antique, Cockerell called second-hand. It cut both ways. During his brother Rod’s last campaign, the General Election of 1955, one old trout in Hertfordshire had buttonholed Troy and informed him of her intention of voting Liberal. She could not vote for Rod—such a nice man, but a Socialist—and she could no longer vote for the Conservative. Why? Troy had asked. He invited us in for tea, the trout had replied, and do you know he had shop-bought furniture! In her book, one closed to such as Cockerell, Troy suspected, the only way to acquire furniture was to inherit it.

‘Do you know what England is?’ Cockerell blathered on. ‘The land of the forgotten parlour, the last bastion of the antimacassar.’

Silently, wishing him no encouragement, Troy concurred entirely with Cockerell’s opinion. It summed England up very well.

‘My old dad kept the key to the front parlour on his watch chain. He’d open it once a week for my mother to do the cleaning, and the rest of the week it was locked to keep us kids out. Fifty-one weeks a year this rigmarole went on. We used the blasted room on Boxing Day, and then we shut it up again, with its immaculate suite, scarcely dented by a human backside, its antimacassars and its sea-shell ashtrays, until next Christmas. By the time I inherited, the furniture was hopelessly out of date. About as fashionable as spats, and looking as new as it did the day the horse and cart delivered it in 1908. I’d’ve given it to a museum if I thought they’d have taken it. As it was I took it outside and I put a match to it. Good riddance, say I. We have to keep up with the times, don’t you agree?’

Troy did not agree. He was not at all sure what this much-used phrase meant. Cockerell gobbled more kedgeree—a surprising appetite for a man so thin—and did not seem to expect an answer.

‘I’ve three shops,’ he went on. ‘In the North and Midlands. One in Derby, one in Alfreton and my HQ in Belper.’

The precision of ‘North and Midlands’ struck Troy as oddly mechanical, somehow devoid of humanity. A place in which no one could really live. The stilted language of a contestant in the regional finals of a ballroom dancing competition. Troy knew Derby. He had spent the best part of a week there hunting down a poisoner in 1951. The other two were merely names, although for some reason Belper sounded vaguely familiar to him.

‘I import and export. The Contemporary look. Mainly Scandinavia, you know. That’s where the best of the new comes from nowadays. But I buy anywhere and I sell everywhere. All over Europe.’

Cockerell finished the last of his kedgeree, pressing his fork down on the last few grains of boiled rice. As if by magic, Mary appeared with the toast. One small silver rack for Troy, and one small silver rack for Cockerell. The difference was that Troy’s toast was a uniform golden brown, while Cockerell’s was white on one side and black on the other. Troy would be damned before he’d trade so much as a slice with this living monument to British boredom. Cockerell scarcely seemed to notice. He scraped away sturdily with his knife at a rock-hard slab of refrigerated butter and prattled on. Had Troy considered the attractions of wall-to-wall carpeting? The phrase meant nothing to Troy. Cockerell explained and even drew the swirls and curves of his own favourite design on the back of an envelope for him.

‘There,’ he said proudly. ‘Skaters. It’s all the rage. At least it will be. I’ve thirty rolls in the Belper shop.’

‘Tell me,’ Troy asked, finishing his toast and knowing he could duck out of any consequences. ‘What brings you to Portsmouth? Wall-to-wall ward room? Scandinavian-design barnacles?’

Cockerell was more than momentarily flummoxed. Troy had said so little, perhaps, that any question, however sarcastic, might stun him to silence. But it seemed more than that. He reddened a little, looked down at his toast and marmalade, and then, shrugging, looked back at Troy, a faint smile on his thin lips, a lost look in his pale blue eyes.

‘Oh, you know, bit of this, bit of that . . .’

It was a lie. As limp as Troy’s own. But if a voluble bore finally resorted to a lie that dribbled down into silence, Troy would at least be grateful for the silence. What matter if the man was away from home, having, as English euphemism so tartly put it, his bit on the side?

True to Troy’s definition of type, he pulled the glass ashtray towards him, pushed away his plate and took a packet of Senior Service from his pocket. The man positively reeked Rotary Club. Troy wondered once more about the suede shoes.

§7

Troy was late. He had dawdled. He checked his watch. It was a quarter to ten. A clear, crisp spring morning. The kind of April Troy thought presaged a good summer. The guard at Her Majesty’s Dockyard Portsmouth—a place known throughout what remained of the Empire as Pompey—looked at Troy’s warrant card and scanned a list of names.

‘You’re not the last,’ he said. ‘Not quite. I’ve yet to see hide nor hair of Inspector Cobb.’ He turned, arm outstretched. ‘Second hut on your left.’

Troy followed where he pointed. He thrust open the door of a wooden hut, and found himself facing a loose squad of five bleary policemen. Four of them sat at a table, one of them slumped forward on his arms quite obviously fast asleep. Troy thought he recognised some of them. A young man, no more than twenty-five, got to his feet.

‘Chief Inspector. I’m Hugh Beynon. Detective Sergeant with the Branch,’ he said.

Troy knew the face. He’d seen him in the corridors at the Yard. Too young to be a sergeant, far too young to be with those bastards at the Branch. Beynon introduced him to Sergeants Beck and Molloy, also of the Branch, and one of them saw fit to nudge Detective Sergeant Milligan, drafted in for the occasion from J Division, into something resembling wakefulness in the presence of a Detective Chief Inspector. He looked up at Troy, muttered a greeting. A greyish fuzz coated his chin. He hadn’t shaved. If Troy knew Cobb, the man was in for a good dressing down. It wasn’t his responsibility, and Troy felt vaguely pleased to be free from it.

The fifth man hogged the stove. A short, fat, miserable-looking man, and a poor-looking specimen for a copper. Oblivious to all around him, he buried himself in the pages of a large, hardbacked book. Troy approached, tipped the book forward to see the title. Lolita—of which he had never heard—by one Vladimir Nabokov—of whom he’d never heard either. The man adjusted his glasses and his focus, and stared for a moment at Troy.

‘Lance Bombardier Clark?’ Troy said.

‘It’s Detective Constable Clark now, sir. And I don’t suppose you’re an Inspector any more, are you, sir?’

‘Chief Inspector. Are you with the Branch?’

‘Lord no, sir. Warwickshire Constabulary. I got roped in for me languages. I’ve Russian as well as German. Truth to tell, all the time I spent in Berlin I’d have to have been deaf not to come away fluent in Russian.’

Troy had not set eyes on Clark since Christmas Day of 1948 in a snow-bound Berlin, to which the late Joseph Stalin had laid siege. Clark, Lance Bombardier, Artillery, had been assigned by the British Army as his translator. Which reminded him that he had last seen Tosca only minutes after the last time he saw Clark. Troy pulled up a chair close to Clark. The policemen had been up since four or five in the morning. They were all drowsy and bedraggled. A private conversation was unlikely to offend.

‘How did they get you?’ he asked simply.

‘Quite straightforward, sir,’ Clark replied. ‘I’d done fifteen years by 1952. I’d made Warrant Officer Class II. I knew I wasn’t what you’d call officer material. Personally, I don’t think I was even Warrant Officer Class I material. It was time to ask for me civvy suit. About that time the force started recruiting in a big way. There’d been that big purge of bent coppers, you’ll recall. They sent a couple of blokes to the base I was on to blow their own trumpet. They told me I was just what the force needed. Languages an’ all. The new breed of educated copper. Brains instead of boots. Fine, I thought. I volunteered. I spent the next three years pounding a beat back in bloody Birmingham. The only foreign language I got to use was if we got villains in from Wolverhampton. About a year ago I got out of uniform. Things’ve looked up a bit since then. This came out of the blue. A right treat. Couldn’t believe me luck.’

‘Nor I.’

Troy dearly wanted to ask Clark about Larissa Tosca. But there was a risk. What had Clark thought she was? That last night in Berlin, he had watched her back into the mess at RAF Gatow, dusting the snowflakes from her WAC’s uniform, and almost collide with Clark, on his way out. Did he ever learn that the uniform was utter deception? A relic of the war that she was no more entitled to wear than Troy himself? Did he ever realise which side she was on?

‘When did you leave Berlin?’ he ventured.

‘Oh, I was there till the end. I saw it all. Mind you, nothing was the same after 1949. Once the Soviets eased up on us it was dull as ditchwater. Life without a few little fiddles wasn’t worth living. They all said it. The army, the spivs, the spies. It was yesterday’s rice pudding.’

Much as Troy wanted news, the ambiguities of ignorance appealed. Supposing Clark knew everything? He had surely seen her sit down with Troy that night? Supposing she had been exposed or purged in one of those countless show trials rigged up by Beria under Stalin’s regime? Did he want to know, and if he wanted to know, did he want to know the worst?

Clark was looking across Troy’s shoulder. He turned. Beynon appeared above him.

‘Excuse us, sir. We was wondering like. It’s past ten and not a sign of Mr Cobb. He dropped us here more than an hour ago. You don’t suppose there’s anything we should be doing? We was wondering. You being the senior man an’ all.’

Troy was about to point out his raw recruit’s status on the operation when the door banged open and Cobb bustled in, red-faced and sweating. He slapped his case onto the trestle table, jerking Milligan once more to life. He looked around him, gasping and out of breath, taking in the room in a sweeping glance. As Troy had expected, that glance came to rest on Milligan.

‘You,’ he barked. ‘Shave and haircut the minute you’re off duty!’

He turned his gaze on Troy.

‘Good of you to join us, Mr Troy!’

‘You didn’t get my message?’ Troy said softly.

‘Yes—I got your message. But if you don’t mind, for the future, once a plan’s been agreed I’d be obliged if you’d stick to it.’

Troy slowly turned his left wrist around. Looked at his watch and looked at Cobb, making his point silently. Cobb ignored the hint. Whatever it was that had made him late, it had severely taxed his physique. The man was streaming sweat, as though he had just won first prize in the sack race.

‘Right,’ he began. ‘Rosters!’

Cobb tore off his blue mackintosh and scattered the schedule for the next ten days across the table. Troy glanced down it. It was chock-a-block. Not a day out of the next ten seemed to have as much as a tea-break built in to it. Bulganin and Khrushchev were about to be bounced the length and breadth of the British Isles by all known means of transport, and to be wined and dined by every dignitary London could unearth, in a punishing round of sociability that would strain a man half their age. For the evening of the twenty-third they were to be the guests of the Labour Party at the House of Commons. Suddenly Troy spotted trouble, but if the Branch and Her Majesty’s Government couldn’t see it, it was, he thought, scarcely his job to point it out to them.

‘First off. For those of you who’ve already spent good money at Moss Bros, there’ll be no evening dress. Our guests appear not to have brought theirs, so we’re all, to avoid embarrassment, to wear plain dark suits for the evening dos.’

Cobb looked briefly but pointedly at Troy. The follow-up to yesterday’s wisecrack.

‘Now—there’s a few rules and regulations. A few dos and don’ts. Cock up and you’ll have me to answer to. We all know why we’re here, and we all know what the front is. Each of you will log on and off shift with me. I want to know when you pick up the nobs and when you drop ’em, and when you drop ’em I want a full verbal report. I’ll be the one to decide what needs to be in writing. You won’t have time to take notes and even if you have, I don’t want anyone caught by the Russians jotting things down. For the purposes of clear communications, Khrushchev is codenamed Red Pig, Bulganin is Black Bear. Nobody uses their real names over the phone. Got it?’

He looked at them all in turn. For no reason Troy could see, he let his gaze rest on Clark.

‘Got it?’ he said again.

Troy heard Clark gulp and manage a faint ‘yessir’.

‘Right. Next on the agenda. Guarding Red Pig and Black Bear.’

He paused. Troy assumed he was straining for the pause to look meaningful.

‘Not your job. Repeat. Not your job. My boys will be everywhere and highly visible.’

‘What? Trench coats and bowler hats?’ said a voice from the back. Troy saw Cobb’s eyes home in. He turned to see Milligan receiving the gorgon stare.

‘Shuttit, laddie. Just shuttit.’

Cobb broke the stare. Looked at the roster in front of him.

‘As it happens,’ he said, reddening slightly, ‘it will be trench coats and bowler hats.’

Troy knew he was grinning. Unless God spared him quickly, a grin would become a snigger and a snigger a laugh and he would have Cobb down on him like an irate schoolmaster, armed with a piece of chalk. The thought of all those flatfoots swarming all over Claridge’s Hotel dressed up like pantomime policemen was too funny to resist.

Cobb’s finger shot out, aiming towards Troy.

‘You! Stop bloody grinning!’

Troy looked back and realised that Cobb was pointing at Clark. The fat little man was smirking with repressed laughter.

‘They’ll do the real work, and they’ll be recognisable. To everyone. But in the event of a real hoo-ha, there’s a routine to go through. First. The only time you do not accompany Red Pig and Black Bear is when other security is provided, e.g., royal palaces, Downing Street. In all other places you stick to them like glue. No matter where. Nobody is exempt. If you have to sit in on a cosy chat with the Archbishop of Canterbury, you do it. Second, you always go through doors ahead of them. Third, if any nutcase has a go at them, you get them out of the room and you let my boys handle the assailant. You do not tackle anyone unless you’ve no choice.’

Beynon’s hand shot up like an eager schoolboy.

‘Excuse me, sir. But have there been any actual threats?’

‘Threats?’ Cobb sneered. ‘Threats? Every bunch of cranks in Britain from the Empire Loyalists to the Last-of-the-Mosleyites has threatened ’em. They’re all nutters and it doesn’t mean a damn. If we believed every crank who thought Khrushchev was the anti-Christ there’d not be a copper left on point duty from here to John O’Groats. All the same, we play safe. Understood? And remember, the Russians wanted the KGB guarding their own blokes. We had quite a row convincing them we weren’t going to have armed Russian bully-boys swanning around London. So—bear this in mind. If we fuck up, we’ll never hear the last of it.’

Again he swept the room with a practised penetrating stare. Practised, no doubt, in front of a bathroom mirror from an early age. Cobb was, Troy decided, a brute of a man, but not the ugly brute he had first supposed. The man’s waffle gave him time to look and appraise. The stare was disturbing, more than Cobb ever meant it to be. He meant merely to command, and he did it rather well. But his eyes seemed asymmetrical. It was the cock-eyed, strabismic stare of a one-eyed man. But Cobb had two eyes. Then the penny dropped. It was the eyebrows. The left eyebrow drew all the attention to the left eye. It was white in the middle. A one-inch strip of premature white hair, as startling to observe as Diaghilev’s two-tone coiffure or the hennaed halo of Quentin Crisp. Troy remembered Cobb’s reputation at the Yard as a ladykiller. He was beginning to see why he had it. There was a slob side to him, that could appeal to the tidy instinct in a woman—a man for whom the right woman could roll pairs of socks into balls ever after—but there was also a raffish, brutal handsomeness to the man. To Troy it bespoke the surly Special Branch bastard. But, it was conceivable that to some young WPCs he was Mr Rochester of the Yard. Brown curls fell across his forehead, his mouth was wide, his jaw strong despite the extra chin—and he dressed surprisingly well. The mackintosh was a Burberry; the neat, double-breasted, figure-flattering blue suit must have cost a packet. Troy was all but indifferent to clothes. He had his suits made in Savile Row out of nothing more than habit. He dressed well only because money let him and tradition paved the way. Taste did not come into it. And a suit as sharp as Cobb’s he did not own.

‘And lastly—’

Lastly? Troy must have missed something.

‘Lastly. These.’

Cobb opened his case and tipped out six police-issue Browning automatics in their shoulder holsters. It was an odd moment. Troy had not seen a gun in a while. It had been well over a year since he had last had to request issue of one. They sat uneasily with his notion of ‘copper’.

‘Sign here. You get two extra clips of nine mill. And you account for every shell spent.’

Troy watched as Beynon, Beck and Molloy slipped into their shoulder holsters like practised gunmen. He fumbled at his. Clark fumbled. Milligan fumbled. It slowly dawned on Troy that the shoulder holster could not be used left-handed. It went under the left armpit or nowhere. Clark managed to sling it around his neck, with the butt of the gun dangling across his sternum. Milligan was all but making a cat’s cradle of it.

Cobb looked at them, making no attempt to disguise his contempt.

‘Jesus Christ. Amateurs. Rank bloody amateurs. Beynon, you show ’em!’

He stormed out. Beynon gave Troy a look that said ‘sorry’.

‘It goes like this, you see, sir.’

He whipped off his own holster and slowly put it back on for the benefit of all three, exaggerating each gesture—the patient Scoutmaster teaching the dimwits a useful knot or two.

‘Left arm first. Down, around the back. Right arm through the elastic side, straight out and pull in. See?’

They saw. Milligan got the hang of it. Troy and Clark looked like the last of the clowns.

‘S’cuse the thought, sir’, said Milligan, ‘but if I ever get Mr Cobb behind the bikesheds . . .’

‘After me in the queue,’ said Troy. ‘If I knew how this thing worked, I’d shoot him myself.’

He put the gun into the holster and put his jacket back on. It felt awkward and it felt silly. It stuck in his armpit like a cucumber. He’d have to live with it. God help Nikita Khrushchev if he ever had to draw it.

Guns boomed in the dockyard. Over and over again. Troy did not need to count. There would be thirteen blasts, as tradition demanded, followed by a Soviet reply of twenty-one. It meant the Russian ships were docking—or World War III had begun. Troy put his overcoat back on and joined the others in the yard.

‘You’re in luck,’ Cobb yelled at them over the sound of the guns. ‘You get a personal introduction. We stand in line and the Foreign Office bloke will introduce you in turn as personal bodyguards. Whatever they say to you, for pete’s sake look as though you don’t understand and don’t answer until the FO have translated for you. As far as the Russians are concerned you’re ordinary coppers—just how ordinary I shudder to think. Right, follow me.’

Cobb led off under the worn brick arch to the berth set aside for the Russian ships. The sun shone, but as they cleared the arch a salt wind came up off the sea to remind Troy that it was still only the middle of April and the weather could turn any minute. The quay was crowded: a horde of pressmen, the gentlemen of Fleet Street, standing around in groups smoking and joking; a horde of Foreign Office bigwigs and little­wigs, the gentlemen of Pall Mall, standing around not smoking and not joking. And, as Cobb had said, the unmistakable presence of Special Branch in its Sunday best, belted trench coats, bowler hats and big feet. There could scarcely be a phone tapped or a skull cracked the length of Britain this morning, there was no one to do it. They were all here looking like they were auditioning for the role of Chinese policeman in a seaside production of Aladdin. Troy did a quick head count of his own party, realised they were seven, and tried not to think of Snow White.

The Royal Navy provided a guard of honour, and the Marines a band to play the round of dreary national anthems. Under the vast grey shadow of the Soviet Navy’s battlecruiser Ordzhonikidze, the dignitaries lined up in precedence to prepare to greet the Russians. Troy found himself between Cobb and Beynon. Peering round Cobb, he could see the Russian Ambassador, Jakob Malik, and the two faces of Britain: the civil in Lord Reading, Minister of State at the Foreign Office, and the military in Lord Cilcennin, First Lord of the Admiralty. Quite what the difference was in their roles he could not say. Although both of them were in the Government, he could not be certain whether Cilcennin was actually in the Navy or not, or whether it was even necessary that he should be in the Navy. Neither of them mattered much. Dogsbodies sent out to do duty on a windswept quayside. Nothing mattered much till they got to Victoria Station, the back door to Westminster, and came face to face with Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden, a veteran of the thirties—that dirty, double-dealing decade—the bright young Foreign Secretary who’d had the courage to resign from the Cabinet over Munich and Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler, and who had for so long been heir apparent to the ageing and ailing Winston Churchill. Apparent no longer—he had been PM for almost a year now, carrying with him the hopes of a nation deeply loyal to the old man, but desperately in need of the new man. The problem, as Troy saw it, was that heir apparent was a role one could play too long.

The idea of meeting Khrushchev rolled Troy back into memories of youth. When he was nineteen or twenty a cousin of his father’s had visited England as part of a Soviet trade mission. He was the only Troitsky Troy had ever met. One of the few to have stayed and tried to make the best of a dire inevitability. Troy’s father had entertained cousin Leo royally, keen for any news of the old country, lost in time like the Sisters Prozorova, dreaming of Moscow once more, drunk on Moscow once more. Moscow. Moscow was the fiefdom of the party boss of the city, a cunning peasant named Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev. It was the first time anyone had heard the name. A hardy survivor of the Revolution, Khrushchev was in the process of building Moscow’s showcase Metro—the triumph of public works over private demands. From the outside it began to look as though the new Soviet Union was raising its head above the parapet for the first time. Cousin Leo had an abundance of tales of the eccentric, domineering, charming, drunken apparatchik in charge of the first burst of colour the Soviet Union had seen in almost twenty years. From time to time Troy had followed the career of this intriguing little man. The late thirties had seen him put in charge of the entire Ukraine—where he took to dressing like a peasant and imitating the accent of the region. More peasant than the peasant, full of old aphorisms and Ukrainian lore. The pretence had cost him. Ever wise to the weaknesses of his subordinates, Stalin had hoisted Khrushchev on his own petard. ‘Dance!’ he had told Khrushchev, and the fifty-two-year-old fat little Khrushchev danced for his life, flailing and sweating at his pastiche of the Ukrainian gopak for the delight of a man who would have thought little of putting him on the next train to Siberia or seeing him hanged in public. The war had found Khrushchev in uniform as a front-line political commissar, a Lieutenant-General—one better than Bulganin, whose title of ‘Marshal’ was hardly more meaningful than that of a Southern Colonel in Mississippi or Tennessee. Khrushchev had, by 1949, reappeared in Moscow as a full-blown member of the Secretariat of the Central Committee, complete with overcoat, Homburg and his place on top of Lenin’s tomb each May Day. Soon enough the old dictator was dead. To those who hardly paid attention to matters Soviet there might have been some immediate confusion as to who had really inherited power—Beria? Malenkov? The mock Marshal, Bulganin? Or the real Marshal, Voroshilov? Nominally, the head of state was Voroshilov, and for the purposes of this visit it fell to Bulganin. Neither Troy, nor HM Government it seemed, had any doubts as to where the real power lay. As far as Troy was concerned, Khrushchev was a rocket waiting for someone to light the blue touch paper and retire. The only thing that was predictable about the man was that he was unpredictable. In his public persona Khrushchev had often struck Troy as having the fundamental defining characteristic of a kitten—a boundless, reckless curiosity.

Sometime between the war and the fall of Beria, cousin Leo had vanished. Troy’s brother Rod had been in the Cabinet in the dying days of the Labour Government and had used what influence he could. All Rod’s enquiries had yielded was that the man had never existed in the first place. A non-person, even in death. In a nation where simply to have survived was an achievement, Khrushchev was the survivor par excellence.

For weeks now rumours had circulated in the Western press that he had denounced Stalin, denounced him as a tyrant responsible for the slaughter of countless numbers of his own people. No one knew for certain, and no one had been able to quote a word the man said as gospel. The Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had been addressed by Khrushchev in a closed session. Yet the effects were noticeable. Reports came in from Poland and from Hungary of a change in the political climate, amounting to a faith in the veracity of the rumour—it was, as so many journalists had remarked, the first sign of a thaw in the cold war, the tinsel rustle of political spring.

The Band of the Royal Marines struck up. Troy looked up at the ship. An interminable row of Soviet dignitaries stood to attention for their national anthem. At their head, two stout little men in vast black coats. Bulganin was not a well-known figure, Khrushchev was, yet they seemed to Troy to be variations on the same theme as they made their way down the red-carpeted gangplank to the quay. They were stout men, they were little men, but their stoutness was at odds with their boyishness. He could think of no other word to describe them. With their round, smiley faces and bright, darting eyes they were like two little boys, two schoolboys blown up into men with a bicycle pump.

They approached the start of the British line and began pumping flesh, Khrushchev following and smiling fiercely, Bulganin leading, smiling, it seemed, more naturally, his beautiful blue eyes shining and his hair coiffured like icing on a cake. As he shook Troy’s hand he looked to Troy like a living parody of Sir Thomas Beecham, right up to the goatee beard. And Khrushchev, Khrushchev only a foot away now, shaking the giant paw of Norman Cobb and looking like the Russian peasant he really was, another rendition of the Ur-Russian face that Troy had seen staring back at him from countless pictures and photographs all his life.

Khrushchev let go of Cobb’s hand. Troy let go of Bulganin’s, and in the twinkling of an eye he found himself clasping the podgy hand of Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, looking into the nut-brown eyes of the leader of the Other World, and counting the warts on the face of the most fascinating man alive.

§8

Khrushchev was a bore. A bully and a bore. There were no two ways about it, the man was terrible. He had all the character and gusto that Troy had expected of him, but shot through with the corruption of power, an easy manipulation of others that manifested itself in an utter lack of regard for the feelings of those others.

In public he deferred to the nominal head of state, Bulganin, and took an impish delight in back-seat driving. In private he bawled him out, shouted at him, called him stupid and told him to the nth detail what to say. He was scarcely better behaved towards his son Sergei, a twenty-two-year-old, slim, quiet version of his father, hidden behind what appeared to be National Health spectacles, who smiled pleasantly at everyone and seemed as eager to please as a boy scout.

But what really put Troy off him were the jokes. Troy thought of himself as a man with a sense of humour, but Khrushchev’s jokes struck him as tasteless and adolescent, as though he were striving too hard to outrage.

The first evening they did a mind-boggling, whistle-stop tour of the sights of London, faster than an American senator running for reelection in the boondocks, pressing the flesh while double-parked. The Royal Festival Hall, that stirring example of the British Soviet School of Architecture; dark, brooding, ancient Westminster Abbey; sublime St Paul’s, a surviving Wren masterpiece in the midst of a sea of wartime ruins; and the floodlit white walls of the Tower of London at dusk, with its red and black romance of beefeaters and ravens. All in less than two hours.

At the RFH Khrushchev appeared singularly unimpressed. He looked at the prices on the bar tariff and said he’d come back on pay day when he could afford it. Not bad, thought Troy, some sense of the wage packet if nothing else. At the Tower, informed that, according to legend, the Empire would cease when the ravens left, Khrushchev quipped that he couldn’t see any ravens in the first place. Nelson putting the telescope to his blind eye. A few smiles were forced but no one laughed. Hardly offensive, but Troy began to wonder if the man had any tact.

At St Paul’s—a building known to still even the arid souls of atheists like Troy—the old Dean showed them the vast dome, in an eerie silence of muted voices and leather footsteps, and remarked with some pride that this was the spot on which a German incendiary had landed in 1940, how the cathedral had been saved, the damage repaired, and how London had lost seventeen of its precious Wren churches. Khrushchev blithely remarked that the Dean wouldn’t have to worry about repairs when the Russians dropped ‘the bomb’.

He did not need to qualify the term. ‘The Bomb’ was ‘The Bomb’. Not HE or incendiary, not 500lb or a ton, but megatons—a word still virtually incomprehensible to most people, often paraphrased in multiples of Hiroshima: twenty Hiroshimas; fifty Hiroshimas. The same town atomised time after time in the power of metaphorical fission. In his mind’s eye Troy saw tiny atolls in the South Pacific going whumpf and disappearing from sight beneath the icon of the times, a colossal mushroom cloud.

The Dean looked blankly at Khrushchev. The presence of an interpreter, the passage of words through a second language and a second voice, seemed somehow to deflect the sense of just who had spoken, to deflate the sense of menace and the contrivance at outrage. Bought the time for tact that Khrushchev himself could not muster. The Dean led off, taking them in search of John Donne’s memorial. Just behind his right shoulder Troy heard a muttered ‘Jesus Christ’ from Milligan.

Troy rapidly lost count of the number of trips they had made. He seemed to be in and out of Claridge’s and Number 10 three or four times a day; and each evening he would dutifully report to Cobb, usually telling him that Khrushchev had said nothing of any significance within earshot. Or did MI5 and MI6 really want to know that he had thrown a tantrum when he couldn’t find a diamond cufflink, or that he complained constantly about the tea? And that on one occasion Troy had found him crawling around the bedroom of his suite on all fours, and had been unable to tell whether this was another search for the missing cufflink or capitulation to the effects of his favoured drink, red pepper vodka?

On the evening of the second day, Downing Street had given a formal dinner for their guests. B & K met C & A, former Prime Ministers Churchill and Attlee, and the Leader of the Opposition, Prime Minister-Apparent Hugh Gaitskell. The Night of the Nobs, as Clark put it.

It was an easy shift ‘doing’ Downing Street. One simply escorted the Russians there, handed over to the highly visible uniformed coppers and shuffled into a side room to sit out the occasion in something resembling a bad version of a dentist’s waiting room. Nothing to read and nothing to do.

‘What’s that?’ said Troy as a uniformed copper pushed the door to.

‘It came yesterday, sir.’

It looked like a ten-foot-long wooden spoon.

‘It’s a ten-foot-long wooden spoon, sir. It was left on the doorstep. The PM ordered it brought in at once before the press saw it. We’re to get rid of it as soon as the Russians are safely out of the country.’

Troy looked at the label attached to the monstrosity.

‘From the League of Empire Loyalists. We fear it may not be long enough for tomorrow’s dinner.’

‘What do you think it means?’ asked the copper.

‘Isn’t it obvious?’ said Troy. ‘A long spoon to sup with the devil.’

There had been a curious reception for the two emissaries of Satan, from the minute the train slid into Victoria Station; and a curious form of protest. And what they had in common was that they were lukewarm. Neither welcome nor dissent seemed to have feeling or meaning to it. Neither could muster a crowd large enough to cut through the roar of the traffic. This particular protest lacked wit. Whilst the duty copper might be the dimmest of flatfoots, and possibly the only person in Britain who had not heard the cliché, it was a symbol so obvious as to be pointless. The cliché of clichés. The League of Empire Loyalists were hardly typical of the British, a nation of non-joiners; but at the same time they were—the nation of non-joiners was also the nation of endless committees and self-appointed bodies. This was simply the silliest of many, the association of old men who had failed to grasp the way of the world since 1945. As Rod put it, describing so many of the institutions of the country from the Carlton Club to the magistracy, just another League of Little Men.

Molloy, with the practised skill of a career copper, had perfected the knack of sleeping bolt upright. Clark, as ever, had a book. Troy was the one who was bored. He wondered if he could get away with stretching his legs. He opened the door quietly. There was a hum of voices, a solitary young copper standing in the hallway. Troy expected a reprimand, but the man simply nodded and said a quiet, ‘Evenin’, sir’, as though Troy had every right to be wandering about. Emboldened by this he strolled as casually as he could up the staircase past endless portraits of previous incumbents from Walpole via Palmerston and Disraeli all the way to Churchill, to the first floor and the reception rooms. The hum of voices grew louder. English and Russian. He could hear someone almost shouting, and deduced that this was translation for the deaf. He was gazing out of a front window when a door behind him opened, the volume surged and he saw what he momentarily took to be an elderly waiter shuffling towards him. It was not an elderly waiter; it was an elderly Prime Minister, a portrait come to life.

‘Harumgrrum werrumbrum,’ said Churchill.

Troy understood not a syllable. What could the former leader of the western world, the undisputed Heavyweight Champion of the Second World War, possibly have to say to him?

§9

The following evening, just before dusk, they took a launch down the Thames from Westminster Pier to Greenwich, one of the pleasantest trips London could offer. It had its effect. A man who talked nineteen to the dozen had shut up by the time they slid under Tower Bridge. Khrushchev did what any man with the slightest poetry in his soul would do. He stared. London changed from the dwarfing magnificence of St Paul’s, hogging the horizon with not a building to equal it for height or breadth, to the dark depths of the East End, a skyline slashed by the blades of cranes and derricks, shoreline fretted by a hundred wharves and harbours, flashing with the rumpled black-and-red sails of countless Thames barges motionless in the Pool of London. As they rounded the Isle of Dogs, the hill of Greenwich came into view, the complex, eye-baffling beauty of the Royal Naval College, the distant outline of the Observatory perched on the hilltop, dividing East from West along an utterly arbitrary line. What better symbol could there be for this entire visit?

Khrushchev preached the new gospel of peaceful coexistence to the Senior Service, spoke of the speed of the arms race, described the Ord­zhonikidze, the ship that had brought him to Britain, as state of the art technology that would be out of date within a matter of months. It seemed to Troy to be a sound argument. Depending on how you read it, it was a warning to us all or a threat to the West. Khrushchev tipped the scales, and added that the Russians had no wish to ‘push you off the planet’. But then that in turn implied that they had the power to do so.

Within minutes of him resuming his seat Troy heard Khrushchev offering to sell the Ordzhonikidze to the First Sea Lord.

‘Buy two, and I’ll throw in a submarine for free,’ he said in best adman parlance.

The Englishman looked utterly baffled by this. He had no idea whether to take it as a joke or to name a price. Troy had no sympathy with such men, and on any other occasion it might have been a good wheeze, a good ruffling of the feathers of these imperial peacocks; but Troy found the menace that lurked just beneath the surface of this unruly schoolboy behaviour too hard to stomach. Three days of jokes and he was beginning to think there was no such thing as a joke that didn’t have hidden depths just like an iceberg. Perhaps the joke was the defence of the underdog? Coming from the topdog it seemed brutal, bullying and boorish.

Only minutes later Khrushchev turned his sights on the Chief of the Imperial General Staff. ‘One day,’ he said, ‘one day soon we will be able to put nuclear warheads onto guided missiles. Believe me, it will change the face of warfare.’

Troy knew from the look on the man’s face, as the interpreter put it into English, what was coming. His expression was the blinking, startled blankness of shock.

‘I find that,’ the interpreter reported back to Khrushchev, ‘a shocking suggestion.’

Khrushchev shrugged a little. ‘It may well be,’ he said. ‘It is nonetheless the future.’

The baldness of truth or the nakedness of threat? And once more Troy’s sympathies swung. Khrushchev’s party was over forty strong. They had required an entire floor of Claridge’s, they were trucked out for all the interminable public functions in varying combinations in a logistic nightmare requiring a convoy of limousines, and enough coppers to mount an invasion of Latvia or Lithuania. Khrushchev meant to show off Russia with an eighty-legged advertisement. Prominent in that advert were Messrs Tupelov and Kurchatov, known respectively for their work on supersonic flight and atomic physics. If not to rub home the possibilities in the conjunction of the two, why else had Khrushchev brought them? To be shocked was the utmost naiveté. The man was CIGS. To be shocked was crass stupidity. If we too were not going to put our nuclear weapons onto rockets and aim them at the cities of our enemies, why else had we gone to the trouble of hijacking the German rocket scientists? Why, even now, was Werner von Braun, inventor of the V2, holed up in some American laboratory if not to invent a rocket capable of carrying a nuclear warhead? Or did this man really think that we could fight another war as we had fought most of the others, by sending a gunboat out to one mutinous colony or another, or an expeditionary force to a troubled ally—was the word ‘Imperial’ in his title so brain-befuddling that he could not see the world as it had been reborn in fire at Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

Both sides bored him rigid. He got into the habit of never being without a book or newspaper. Prompted by the Greenwich trip, he dug out an old copy of The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad, in which a child is blown to pieces unwittingly carrying a bomb to the Observatory. Every time he was shuffled into a side room at Number 10 or stuck in Khrushchev’s suite at Claridge’s he would read a few more pages of Conrad and scan the newspapers. Occasionally the two worlds would meet. The world in front of his eyes would be reflected in the remote world-out-there, the world-in-print: thirty thousand dissidents released in Poland; Soviet Admiral of the Fleet Kuznetsov sacked; Stalinist Politburo member Andrei Vishinsky denounced for his part in the show trials of the thirties; the head of MI6 to be replaced. This was oddly timed. Why now of all times? And of course the newspapers did not name the new man. Troy made a mental note to ask Rod the next time they met. Rod could not resist a bet, and Troy had a vague memory of him putting ten bob on some chap called White, or was it Black?

On the Saturday, out at Harwell, the Atomic Research Establishment, Khrushchev hit rock bottom in Troy’s esteem. Establishment was an odd term; it concealed more than it revealed about the true nature of the place. But, in part, it was a factory, and being such had factory workers. As the visiting party sped around in their white coats, they would pause like passing royalty for meaningless banter with the working man.

The working man departed from the script. A large man, northern accent, gentle face, huge hands, which he, playing the part to the hilt, was found wiping on a rag as the party approached. Troy had no idea what job he did in this complex of concealment—it seemed to him that the only reason they were here was to shove the notion of ‘atomic’ down Khrushchev’s throat. All the way there Troy had heard him ask, ‘Is this a factory, now? I asked for more factories.’

Khrushchev shook the working man’s hand.

‘Pleased to meet yer,’ the working man said.

Then he looked at his hand, palm up, checking the level of grease and dirt.

‘Yer’ll not have to mind the muck,’ he said. ‘Honest toil, after all.’

He smiled. Khrushchev smiled at the translation. For a moment they seemed to be on the same wavelength.

‘I’m a Union man meself,’ the working man went on. ‘Man and boy. Joined when ah were sixteen.’

Khrushchev clearly found this less than fascinating, but continued to smile.

‘Ah wanted to ask yer, like.’

His eyes strayed off to the accompanying faces, seeking authority. He looked at Troy, who pointed discreetly to the young chinless wonder from the Foreign Office who had trailed after them all day looking lost.

‘I mean, it’s OK ter ask ’im a question, in’t it? ’E dun’t mind answerin’ questions.’

The FO wonder looked nonplussed. Khrushchev’s interpreter whispered it rapidly in his ear. Khrushchev said, ‘Da, da’, syllables so simple as to be comprehensible across any barrier, and gestured with his hand. A flicking, upward motion that seemed to Troy indicative of his dwindling patience.

‘When are you going to have free trade unions in the East?’ the working man asked at last, without a trace of the hesitation that had dogged him up to now.

The FO man gasped audibly. He’d obviously been expecting something about the price of cabbage, or Khrushchev’s recipe for a bloody Mary. The interpreter, a man who seemed to exercise no censorship on anything put to him, rendered it precisely for Khrushchev. It was, Troy thought, the first sensible question anyone had asked. Khrushchev didn’t walk off in outrage. Nor did he attempt an answer. He behaved like a politician; did what any politician, in any country, would do. He ducked it.

‘We’ll get nowhere if we start criticising each other. Consider our point of view and we will consider yours.’

Which meant absolutely nothing.

‘He’s just another damn politician,’ Troy told Charlie when Charlie phoned to ask ‘how things were going’.

‘What did you expect? The new Messiah?’

‘No. I just . . . I just thought he’d be . . . well . . . different.’

‘Oh, he’s different all right,’ said Charlie.

And Troy found himself wondering whether he could wait long enough to find out how different.

§10

By the Monday following, as they piled into black Daimlers once more for dinner with the Labour bigwigs at the Commons, he found an old Hollywood phrase lodged in his mind: ‘Who do I have to fuck to get off this picture?’

But as they entered the Harcourt Room to be greeted by Hugh Gaitskell, suddenly Troy realised the turn the evening was about to take. The big picture was about to start. All they’d had till now was Pearl, Dean and Younger and a short from the Three Stooges. Tonight they were showing in Cinemascope.

Gaitskell held out his hand. The interpreter rattled off his few words of greeting. Then Gaitskell said, ‘Allow me to introduce my Foreign Affairs spokesman, Rodyon Troy.’ And before the interpreter could get his twopenn’orth in, Rod was shaking hands with Khrushchev and chatting to him in his flawless, old-fashioned, pre-revolutionary, upper-crust, Muscovite-accented Russian.

Khrushchev’s eyes flickered between Rod and Troy. The subtle, perfect double-take of a comedian. Jack Benny eyeing Rochester could not have done it better. Rod was taller, stouter, older than Troy, but the family resemblance was inescapable: the thick mop of black hair, the ebony eyes, the full mouth.

Rod led Khrushchev off into the room. He shook hands with odds and sods from the Shadow Cabinet, scarcely seeming to listen to the routine Russian rattle of Rod’s Who’s Who in the Labour Party. As he gripped the hand of Shadow Chancellor Harold Wilson, Khrushchev’s piggy eyes shot Troy a reproachful glance, and he knew that whatever happened, the return to Claridge’s would not be pleasant. Perhaps there was a God after all? Perhaps his wish had been granted, his cover blown—and in the morning Cobb would kick him off the job?

A Commons waiter appeared suddenly at his side.

‘Mr Troy, sir. We’ve put you at the top table. Next to Mr Brown. Your sergeants at opposite ends of the furthest table. Mr Cobb said you should be spread out across what he called the field of vision.’

God, Cobb was an idiot. Full of jargon and fury. Signifying bugger all.

‘Good,’ Troy said. ‘When Manny Shinwell pulls out his sawn-off shotgun I want to be certain of catching him in a crossfire.’

The waiter didn’t seem to get the joke.

‘Mr Shinwell will not be attending, sir,’ he said quite seriously.

Perhaps Troy was catching tastelessness from Khrushchev? He found a place with his name card on it. There was nothing else to do, so he sat down, feeling the nip as his Browning in its ludicrous holster jabbed him in the ribs. A few minutes later, the table began to fill. Next but one to him was Sergei, next to him one of the interpreters, next to him Wilson, next to him Rod, next to him another interpreter, next to him Bulganin, then the last interpreter, then Khrushchev and then Gaitskell. He looked at the place name of the vacant seat between himself and Sergei. It said ‘Mr Brown’. But which Mr Brown?

Way over the other side, he could see Clem Attlee take his seat; down the room Clark and Beynon looked distinctly uncomfortable, disturbed by, rather than appreciative of, the democratic touch that had led them to be seated at the table and fed, rather than stuck along the walls and ignored for the duration of a five-course dinner. He didn’t envy them—ordinary coppers having to make small talk with the people’s representatives, whose grasp of the people they represented was based on researchers’ briefings and what the newspapers told them to believe. He’d no idea what he’d say himself if any of these unworldly beings deigned to engage him in small talk. Down there with Clark and Beynon he caught a glimpse of Tom Driberg. A friend from the war years. Too far away for a chat. Then he heard the scrape of a chair being pulled back and turned to see a short, stout, owlish man sat next to him. Brown. Of course. George Brown. MP for Somewhere-up-North. Shadow Minister for Something-or-Other. He had met him once or twice. Neither a friend nor an enemy of Rod’s. Somewhat to the right of the party, and known for his outspokenness.

Brown exchanged a few pleasantries with Troy. Nice enough bloke, thought Troy. The chap on his left was deep in conversation with his neighbour, and when Brown started an awkward, mediated chat with Sergei, Troy realised he had been let off very lightly, and was free to graze his way through the awful House of Commons food and . . . well . . . dammit . . . daydream. In the event of any of the old fogeys really having a shotgun, Beynon could be the one to plug him dead.

He dreamed his way through the delights of a weekend back in the country, something he looked forward to after a fortnight traipsing around London. Of spotted pigs and sprouting Aprilish vegetables. And when he had dreamed his rural idyll away he seemed to see in his mind’s eye the score of a Thelonious Monk arrangement he had spent a small age trying to master. April in Paris. The score was an illusion. He had never seen it written down—nor, he felt, had Monk—it was a visible pattern of fingers moving across a keyboard. An audible antipattern of deliberative tangents, of musical geometry.

He had dreamed a dream too far. He could smell pipe tobacco, pulling him back to the solid world. The meal was over. They were into the speeches. He hadn’t noticed the pudding even as he ate it. Khrushchev was on his feet, the translator racing to keep up with him. And the seat next to him was empty. At some point Brown had sloped off. Troy looked around. Brown had moved around to face Khrushchev across the table, the pipe smoke was his. Suddenly Driberg appeared in the vacant seat.

‘Fancy seeing you here,’ he said, and Troy knew he was up to something. Khrushchev was still droning on about the new era of peace. Driberg all but whispered in his ear. ‘I don’t suppose you could get me an interview with Khrushchev, could you?’

‘You suppose right.’

Driberg leaned closer. Oblivious as ever. ‘It could be very useful to me. I mean . . . none of the papers have got a look-in. No press conference, nothing. The Reynolds News or even the Herald couldn’t possibly turn me down if I brought them an exclusive.’

‘Tom, fuck off.’

‘Oh, come on. You could do it.’

‘With Bulganin and the embassy staff and the interpreters hanging about?’

‘You could get him alone. You speak the lingo.’

Troy took his eyes off Khrushchev and looked at Driberg. ‘Tom,’ he said softly, ‘has it ever occurred to you that Khrushchev doesn’t know that, and might not be supposed to know that?’

‘Bugger,’ said Driberg and lapsed into a silence that Troy knew from experience could only be temporary.

In the gap he suddenly became aware that Khrushchev’s tone had changed. He was on a different tack, there was a passion in his voice which no translator could hope to convey.

‘Peace has been too long coming. We have extended the olive branch time after time only to see it snapped off in our hands. We were a young country in 1919, building ourselves anew in the wake of a war that had almost destroyed us, free for the first time in history from the yoke of tyranny. We asked for help. What did you send? Soldiers to Archangel and Murmansk. An attempt to force a restoration upon us. Then in the 1930s—we were fighting Hitler long before you in Britain knew who he was.’

A ripple of murmuring dissent went around the room. Brown grunted so audibly that Khrushchev looked straight at him, missed a single beat in the rising tempo of his improvisation on a theme, then took it up again. He was jazzing. It was what the man did best. In his mind’s eye Troy saw Monk’s fingers flash swiftly across the keys.

‘Do I need to remind you that the primary purpose of Nazism was opposition to the inferior race, the Slav; opposition to the demonic ideology, the Bolshevik? We were ready for Hitler throughout your compromises, ready for Hider when he invaded Czechoslovakia—’

‘Then why did Joe Stalin sign a pact with Hitler?’ said a voice from the back of the room. There was a brief pause in the heat as the interpreter spoke rapidly to Khrushchev sotto voce, his hands upturned, their heads bowed into a private huddle.

Khrushchev had not seen who had spoken. It didn’t matter. It seemed to Troy that any one of them could and would have said it.

‘Necessity,’ Khrushchev began again. ‘Something you in the West seem scarcely capable of understanding. We either fought Hitler standing alone or we found some other way. That is necessity! We had troops massed on the border ready to aid our brethren in Czechoslovakia. The Poles would not let us through, because they took the line laid down by the French, by the British, by Chamberlain!’

Again the rippling murmur of concern. But no voice of dissent. Troy doubted whether even the Tories would be able to raise a voice that would defend Chamberlain.

‘We had troops at the ready. A pact guaranteeing our help. What did the British do? They sent us a mission, who could say nothing, who could hear nothing, who could only sit and drink tea! And all the time your Government was egging Hitler on, prodding him eastwards away from your shores. If you and the French had understood us more, had shown us as a new, struggling nation, more understanding, instead of perceiving us as simply godless regicides, if you had cooperated with us, talked to us, I tell you now that the last war could have been avoided.’

This stunned the Labour Party. It was almost the unthinkable. But Troy had long since, ever since Winston had got on his hind legs the best part of ten years ago in Missouri and dropped the Iron Curtain, felt this to be an age that specialised in thinking the unthinkable.

Out of the slightness of silence, the mereness of murmur, one voice spoke clearly. Brown.

‘May God forgive you!’

The interpreter showed a shred of tact. Troy could hear him whisper and the very angle of his arms and shoulders spoke denial—he was trying to tell Khrushchev he had not heard what Brown said. Khrushchev asked Brown to repeat what he had said. A buzz went round the room, a sizzling concern. Brown should not say it again. Brown went through the motions of relighting his pipe.

Khrushchev said, ‘What’s the matter? Are you frightened to make yourself heard?’

The interpreter, his tact and defiance exhausted in a single burst, rendered it instantly into English.

Brown waved out his match, drew once on the pipe and took it from his lips.

‘No,’ he said clearly and calmly. ‘I said, “May God forgive you.”’

Khrushchev did not take his eyes off Brown. He drew a deep breath and exploded. Troy had the feeling that he was not the only person to notice that Khrushchev had not waited for the translation. The translator had not spoken.

‘No, little man. Your God may forgive you! Do you really think anything has changed since Archangel? Do you really think that your creeping Socialism makes you superior to us? Why, you are more opposed to us than the Conservatives! And if I were British I would be a Conservative! Your support for us has been non-existent. All you do is harass us over Eastern Europe!’

This brought Nye Bevan to his feet, wagging his finger at Khrushchev, saying, ‘Don’t try and bully us!’

‘And don’t wag your damn finger at me,’ said Khrushchev, and took off into a tirade that the interpreter could not keep up with. Among a dozen insults Troy caught ‘Наглость’—‘cheek!’

Rod got slowly to his feet. Waited for the steam to go out of the man. The very fact that he stood there and said nothing seemed to bring Khrushchev to a halt, like an old engine gliding slowly to the buffers.

Rod spoke in the quiet, demonstrative tones that chilled Troy to the bone with their reminder of his father’s technique for public speaking. He seized an audience by timbre—Troy could think of no other word for it—rather than by volume or speed; let the tessitura of his voice hold his listeners. It shut Khrushchev up. It shut the Labour Party up—and they hadn’t a clue what he was saying.

‘It seems, Comrade Khrushchev’—no other that night had called him comrade—‘that this is an apt moment at which to give you this. These are the names of political dissidents in Hungary, in Poland, in East Germany, in Czechoslovakia, who are missing. I would be most grateful to you if you could be of any assistance to me in tracing these people and in informing their families of their whereabouts.’

Rod said no more, simply held out a single sheet of paper folded over. Khrushchev would not take it. A stalemate that seemed to drag on for the best part of half a minute followed, until the interpreter risked life and job by plucking the list gently from Rod’s hand. The spell broke. The mirror crack’d from side to side. Khrushchev headed for the door. All over the room, chairs were pushed back. Troy had to run to reach the door before Khrushchev got through it. They met almost shoulder to shoulder, almost collided. Troy could have sworn he heard Khrushchev say, ‘Bugger the lot of them’—and then they were out.

§11

Out in the Commons yard, in the April drizzle, Khrushchev was raging.

‘Они насрали на Россию! Они насрали на Россию! They shit on Russia! They shit on Russia!’

He bellowed at the embassy staff, bellowed at Bulganin, and when his translator moved to get into the Daimler, he snatched Rod’s list from his hand and firmly pointed him to the escort car. Troy followed, assuming he meant to simmer alone, but Khrushchev stopped him with a hand on his sleeve.

‘No,’ he said, almost calm. ‘Not you. You get in the back.’

The car moved off towards Victoria and Hyde Park Corner—Clark in the front with the driver, the dividing screen fully closed, and Troy in the back with quite possibly the most powerful man on earth, wondering what on earth was coming next. Khrushchev looked out of the window of the moving car, not speaking to Troy. As they passed Westminster Cathedral he turned his head and ducked to get a look at the looming red-brick tower, but still he said nothing. No tourist question. No tasteless black joke. At Hyde Park Corner he took Rod’s list from his inside pocket and looked at it for a moment or two. As his hand slid the folded paper back into his pocket, his eyes still focused on the street outside, he asked, ‘Who was he? The man with the names.’

‘My brother,’ Troy answered.

‘And where did you boys learn your Russian?’

‘At home. In the nursery. From our parents.’

‘From your parents,’ Khrushchev echoed flatly. It sounded to Troy more like realisation, a gentle mulling over, than a question.

‘The family name is Troitsky.’

‘Aha . . . Whites!’

Khrushchev at last looked at Troy. A glint of triumph in the nutty little eyes.

‘No,’ Troy replied. ‘Nineteen-o-fivers.’

‘Mensheviks?’

‘More like Anarchists, I think. But that was a long time ago.’

‘Indeed. And now?’

‘My brother, as you will have gathered, has made his peace with history and joined the Labour Party. Whatever you might think, they are Social Democrats, no more, no less than that.’

‘And you?’

‘I’m a policeman. I have no politics.’

‘If a Soviet policeman made such a statement to me I’d have him fired for thinking I was stupid. You don’t think there’s a sentient being on this planet who can honestly say he has no politics, do you?’

Of course Khrushchev was right. Troy knew that. Years ago, in Berlin, not long after the war, a Russian spy had told him that his father had been an agent of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union ever since leaving Russia in the chaos of 1905. Frequently Troy had thought about this. It was something he did not want to believe, and in the end was something he had chosen not to believe. It was certainly not a conversation he wished to have with the First Secretary of that party.

‘Where are you from?’ Khrushchev asked.

‘Moscow mostly. Before that Yasnaya Polyana. It’s near Tula.’

‘I know where it is. I’ve been there several times. The place is virtually a Tolstoy museum now.’

‘I envy you, Comrade Khrushchev. I’ve never seen it. I don’t suppose I ever will.’

‘Come to Russia.’

Troy looked at Khrushchev. He was smiling. Perhaps he even meant it.

‘I don’t think that’s possible. My family history is a bit more complicated than I could tell you.’

‘Come to Russia,’ he said again. ‘I’ll show you a good time. Better than this dreary traipsing round the monuments of Britain.’

‘You’ve met Eden. You’ve met the Queen and the Duke. It hasn’t all been St Paul’s and the Tower.’

‘Eden’s a monument. The Royals are monuments.’

Troy agreed wholeheartedly, but felt it was not for him to say so at this or any other juncture.

‘Where are the people? Where are the workers?’ The fat little hands, with their stubby little fingers spread outwards, emphatically open and empty. ‘Where are the peasants?’

Khrushchev had a point. The crowds had been thin on the ground from the start. B & K had been somewhat less than mobbed. In anticipation Troy had assumed that the visit would be little different from visiting royalty or a personal appearance by Frank Sinatra or Johnnie Ray; in reality he had almost begun to wonder if the English had been told to stay home, or if, perhaps, Gone With the Wind was showing nightly on ITV.

‘I doubt the English have any peasants. And you met a worker on Saturday. You just chose to shortchange him.’

‘You mean at Harwell?’ Khrushchev was almost shouting again. ‘The man was an Eden apparatchik! A stooge!’

Quickly Troy weighed up the risk and concluded it was worth it. After all, his cover was blown, and with it probably the cover of the entire squad, and he would, no doubt, find himself resuming his holiday with a flea in his ear from the Branch, on the morrow.

‘With all respect, Comrade Khrushchev, he wasn’t. He was speaking his mind. Quite possibly the only person you’ve talked to this entire trip who has. And I do not mean by that that I question the integrity of George Brown or of my brother, but they, like you, are politicians.’

Troy paused. In for a penny, in for a thousand roubles, he thought. If Khrushchev was about to explode again, so be it. He would be the one to light the blue touch paper, and with any luck he would be the one to retire safely. It really was irresistible.

‘If you were to ask me, I would tell you that the trip, for you and for the Marshal, has been a diplomatic contrivance on both sides. Your own side doesn’t want you meeting the people. It’s a waste of their time. They’d far rather you chewed the fat with a dimwit like Eden or exchanged brown bears and harmless pleasantries with Her Majesty. The British don’t want you meeting the people. They’d far rather you were perceived as someone stripped of normal human feeling by the godlessness of Marxism. The last thing Eden wants is you pressing the flesh among the proles.’

Troy paused again. Cobb would surely fire him the minute he learnt that Khrushchev had seen through their pathetic charade. He had nothing to lose, not a damn thing.

‘However, if that’s what you want, it’s not yet nine-thirty and I’m sure something could be arranged.’

Khrushchev twinkled, mischief rippling out across those chubby cheeks, lighting up the impish eyes.

‘An English pub?’

‘If you like.’

‘A pint of “wallop”?’

‘That’s what they’re for.’

‘The metro?’

‘We call it the tube, but if that’s what you want, I’d be happy to show it to you.’

Troy looked back at Khrushchev, resisting the grin that threatened to split at any second. The best, surely, was yet to come.

‘Ditch the embassy people,’ he said. ‘And we’ll go on somewhere.’

The phrase pleased Troy enormously. He was not at all sure he’d ever used it before, or that his Russian rendered it precisely. It was a man’s phrase, Charlie’s phrase, the turn of phrase men like Charlie used to pick up women or to armtwist old mates into drinking longer after tolerance of pub crawling had expired. Somehow it seemed wholly appropriate for the daring into which he now tempted Comrade Khrushchev.

§12

Back at Claridge’s, Khrushchev stormed up to the mezzanine, trailing Special Branch and KGBniks from his apron strings. In the anteroom of his suite he announced his exhaustion and with it an early night. No one seemed surprised, but there was hesitation. Troy could not count, but putting the English and the Russians, the police and the spooks, the scientists, the dutiful son and the embassy officials together, there must have been fifteen or more people standing wondering what they were supposed to do next. Khrushchev left them in no doubt.

‘Out!’ he bawled.

In seconds, Troy found himself in a group of four. Himself, Clark, a tall, calm young KGB officer and Khrushchev.

Khrushchev led off into the sitting room. The KGB man followed. Clark’s expression was crystal clear. ‘What now?’ said the look in his eyes, the slant of his mouth. Troy waved him into a chair, and followed Khrushchev.

The KGB man opened his case and set what appeared to be a large ornamental box—the sort of thing one brought back from a foreign holiday and kept stale fags in ever after—on the coffee table. He flipped open the lid. Troy had a fleeting glimpse of dials and lights, then the man nodded to Khrushchev and left. As the door closed Khrushchev flung himself down on the sofa.

‘It’s all right. You can speak now. No one will hear us.’

Really? Troy could hardly believe this.

‘There are no hidden microphones. My men swept the entire suite before we arrived last Monday. They’re not tapping the phone either, which confirmed our suspicions. Your people have found a way to use a telephone as a radio transmitter. And we in our turn have found a way to jam it. Be a good boy and pour us both a vodka.’

He reached for the telephone.

‘I hope you don’t smoke. There was no room for any fags in the box once we’d installed the jammer.’

Troy opened a fresh bottle of red pepper vodka and pinned back his ears. It was a simple conversation.

‘Дейстуй,’ said Khrushchev. ‘Do it.’

There was a pause.

‘Дейстуй,’ he said again, and hung up.

If he was wrong, and MI5 were tapping the line, then they’d learn bugger all from that, thought Troy.

Khrushchev belted back the vodka. Troy sipped at his, thought it an acquired taste, and abandoned it. Khrushchev disappeared into the bathroom. Two minutes later he reappeared, scrubbed fresh like a schoolboy, and red of cheek. A minute more and they faced a disbelieving Clark in the anteroom.

It felt to Troy like an audience with the headmaster. He looked at them dressed in topcoats and ready for the street, put down his book and stood up, as though trying to make the most of investing his short stature with a little gravity. His expression both mournful and incredulous.

‘Oh, bloody Nora. Oh, bloody Nora. Tell me I’m wrong. You’re never taking him out?’

‘Just check the corridor and the back stairs, Eddie.’

‘Mr Cobb’ll hang us out to dry if you’re seen. You know that, don’t you, sir?’

‘And when have any of us seen Cobb after nine o’clock at night? Go and look.’

Troy and Khrushchev waited in silence for Clark to return. Khrushchev hummed a little tune and jingled the coins in his pocket. Troy thought he recognised the tune as ‘Love and Marriage’—a recent hit for Frank Sinatra—‘they go together like a horse and carriage’. It seemed improbable, but who knew what acid drops of Western culture had seeped through the bullet-proof windows of the Daimler to settle corrosively in the man’s unconscious?

‘You’re in luck,’ Clark said when he came back. ‘There’s Beynon outside the Marshal’s door, there’s one of Mr Cobb’s men sleeping upright on the mezzanine stairs, and there’s another three in the linen room playing pontoon. The bloke on the garage has retreated into the glass booth the jobsworth has at the garage door. He’s the only one likely to see anything.’

‘Fine,’ said Troy. ‘Wish us luck and we’ll be off.’

‘Luck be damned. You’ll get me shot.’

Troy opened the door, looked both ways and they dashed for the door to the service stairs, which led down to the underground car park. It was dark and low; the glass booth at the entrance shone like a beacon. Troy could see Cobb’s constable, sitting with the Claridge’s man, hat off, feet up, sipping tea and nattering. Such was the contrast in light, it would be nigh impossible for either of them to see out.

He opened the boot of the Bentley.

‘I thought you promised me the metro,’ Khrushchev said.

‘We need a car to get out of here. And you can’t ride the tube looking like Nikita Khrushchev. You can’t go into an English pub looking like the Russian bear.’

Troy pulled out an old gabardine mackintosh and a cloth cap he used on odd occasions when he needed to follow people without looking like a copper and told Khrushchev to swap coats. The mac was tight on Khrushchev, and suitably tatty compared to his own, but the cap fitted, and beneath their shabbiness he looked surprisingly English. Troy took the scarf Khrushchev wore so elegantly beneath his jacket and threaded it like a muffler, with a huge knot under his chin. Giving him the once-over, the ensemble still lacked a certain je ne sais quoi.

‘Put your glasses on,’ said Troy.

Khrushchev fished out a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles, in which he usually, Troy had noticed, managed to avoid being photographed. He blinked at Troy through them. Troy weighed him up. Not only did he look English, he reminded Troy of those sturdy Londoners, packed with muscle after a lifetime in the docks, now running gently to seed on a diet of chips and beer. It solved a problem. Despite the promise, Troy had had no idea quite where to take him. The Salisbury carried the danger of running into Charlie; any pub in Soho, from the Salisbury all the way to the Fitzroy, via the Coach and Horses and the Colony Club, carried the risk of an encounter with Johnny Fermanagh. The man’s face had been plastered all over the papers for the best part of a week. Only the marriage of Prince Rainier of Monaco to the unbelievably beautiful American film star Grace Kelly had eclipsed him—the best joke of the entire trip had been when a bunch of undergraduates greeted the Russian leaders with a poster reading ‘Welcome Grace and Rainier’, and it rammed home the point: Khrushchev was as famous as any film star. Where in London would Troy find a pub whose regulars paid more attention to Grace Kelly than they would to Nikita Khrushchev? Like it or lump it, Nikita Sergeyevich was about to make a trip into the heart of London’s East End, where, if they’d read them at all, yesterday’s papers would be wrapping tonight’s chips. He liked the idea. He’d not been down the Brickie’s Arms in a long time. There was a place where it was possible to earwig conversations in Yiddish or Polish; Russian would hardly seem remarkable or worth remarking. He’d seen too little lately of George Bonham, the gentle giant, retired station sergeant of his old nick in Stepney, and a Brickie regular. George’s good nature would not lead him to question Troy if he passed Khrushchev off as a distant relative, and his grasp of current affairs was almost nil. Troy had spent much of the war explaining the war to him. After the war he had spent almost as much time explaining the new welfare state.

So far, so good, thought Troy, as they rode the escalator down to the Central line at Oxford Circus. He had told Khrushchev to lie low as they drove past the Special Branch flatfoot in the glass booth. He parked the car two streets away, and walked with him the last quarter mile across Mayfair. Khrushchev was gazing about him intently, his expression flickering between fascination and disgust at the plethora of advertising that lined the escalator shaft, learning the English obsession with health and quackery—of the reinvigorating powers of Horlicks and ‘Yeast-Vite’; and their careless obliviousness to health and common sense—of the strength, mildness, coolness, flavour, ad infinitum, of Kensitas, Churchman’s No.1 and a dozen other brands of fag. And the breasts, a diagonal gallery of breasts, a moving staircase of tit and titillation, advertising every conceivable form of ‘foundation’, that is ways to wrap and pack women into their own clothes. It was little short of a national obsession; the day was approaching when tits could be used to sell anything. Divide and conquer. Up, out and cleave.

At platform level Khrushchev took in everything, poring over the multicoloured map of the tube lines, even begging a sixpence off Troy to try the chocolate machine.

They boarded an eastbound destined for Hainault. It was well past rush hour, and the train was sparsely populated with mid-evening travellers, not one of whom paid the slightest bit of notice to Khrushchev. Khrushchev stared openly. Troy tried seeing the English through his eyes. It must, he thought, strike him as very familiar, if all the clichés of the popular press’s version of the USSR were to be believed. The English were a drab bunch. A uniform bunch. Grey men in grey clothes. Bad haircuts, bitten fingernails, nicotined fingers, clacking false teeth, leaking shoes, stained trousers that hardly saw a dry cleaner’s from one year to the next and, on a night like this, a rippling sea of wet gabardine—a sensory assault of damp and dirt. Miserable, downtrodden men in a miserable downtrodden nation. A nation, he hardly dared think, in need of some sort of revolution. Not marching in the streets, not the storming of the Winter Palace—that after all was Sandringham, too far away, and so unpalace-like—but a cultural revolution, something to shake the cobwebs off the country. Had Troy felt any close identification with his nation, he too, like Her Majesty’s Government, would have thought twice about showing it off to any foreigner.

At each station Khrushchev got out, stood among the jostle of passengers elbowing their way home, and looked around him rather like a jaded train-spotter, the amateur expert—seen it, done it—to whom no sight can ever be fresh. Troy passed on Holbom, stayed put in the car. Holbom had cost him too much already. By the time they reached Bank, Khrushchev was ready to deliver his appraisal.

‘It lacks grandeur,’ he said simply.

Troy thought about it. Grandeur was not part of it. The London Underground was a piecemeal creation of lines dug separately by different private and public enterprises over a period of almost a hundred years. They each had their own idea of how to dress up a hole in the ground, but Troy doubted if grandeur had ever been part of anyone’s scheme.

‘My metro, in Moscow. My metro can hold its own with the finest palaces on earth. It is a cathedral under the ground.’

There were many who thought St Pancras railway station as fine as any cathedral. Troy thought of going out of their way to show it him—a quick change to the Northern line now would have them there in ten minutes—but decided instead to tell him the old chestnut about the American tourist mistaking it for St Pancras Church and respectfully removing his hat as he entered. Khrushchev shrugged. Knowing nothing of the sheer beauty of Sir George Gilbert Scott’s unearthly masterpiece of turrets and gables and countless tiny, dormer windows, he probably took it as merely indicative of American naiveté. The anecdote neither amused nor interested him. He was thoroughly preoccupied with the recorded announcements urging him in the strangled tones of pre-war received pronunciation to ‘Mind the gap!’ One day, Troy thought, when presumptive classlessness had rendered all England gorblimey, RP would survive in dark corners of the London Passenger Transport Board, still warning people to ‘stand clear of the doors’ and ‘mind the gap’ in the superfluous diphthongs of a lost age.

A far better place to change, Troy concluded, was Liverpool Street, London’s terminus for the old Great Eastern Railway, where a Piranesi-like nightmare of catwalks in the sky, usually shrouded in a miasma of soot and steam, was mirrored by an equally labyrinthine network of gloomy tunnels underground. Besides, it was the only place on the entire Under­ground system where you could prop up a bar, pint in hand, without even leaving the platform.

Troy bought halves. He didn’t want to be here all night.

Khrushchev sipped at his beer and pronounced it good. It wasn’t, but Troy had instigated an expedition in search of the common man—it was not for him to reject the common man’s taste. Tom Driberg had often urged him to drink beer as the first and simplest way to break the ice with the lower classes, but Troy hated the stuff and did not, in any case, share Driberg’s sexual fascination with the working man. Khrushchev stood on the down Metropolitan platform, elbow on the bar, shoulder to shoulder with a working man, who was nose-deep in the late final Evening Standard and oblivious to his presence.

The platforms were deserted, devoid of Londoners but strewn with their litter, a windswept mess of toffee papers—the British had binged on confectionery ever since it came off ration—cigarette ends and old newspapers. Troy watched Khrushchev watching an old Standard with Grace Kelly’s face on the front being wafted across the platform and onto the track. It flipped over completely as it left the edge and Princess Grace’s face gave way to Khrushchev’s own. Troy wondered, as the picture disappeared under the wheels of an oncoming train, whether Khrushchev had just felt someone walk over his grave. Instead he took his glass in hand, walked out to the middle of the platform and looked up the line, the knowing train-spotter once more. Past the end of the platforms, the blackened walls of buildings rose like a canyon before the tunnel to Moorgate swallowed the tracks. Beer and bar apart, it was a depressing pit. It required an odd mentality to like it, a twist in the mind that could enjoy this cold, subterranean world, neither indoors nor out. Sometimes Troy had it, sometimes he hadn’t. Sometimes he could spend whole evenings down here. Sometimes he loathed the place. A couple of years after the war, Johnny Fermanagh had taken him on a classic pub crawl around the bars of the Circle line. Starting out from Sloane Square’s southside bar with a horde of Johnny’s drinking cronies, pockets stuffed with miniatures, they had boozed and schmoozed their way to the Hole-in-the-Wall at King’s Cross, to Liverpool Street, to come full circle at Sloane Square, shedding cronies all the way, until just he and Johnny remained to attempt the round one more time, only to fall short and end up at Liverpool Street again, pissed and penniless in this pit of soot and iron. Years, decades after the ending of steam-hauled trains, the underground still smelt of soot. Aldgate, one station down the line towards Victoria, was quite literally a pit, dating from the plague of 1666. The engineers of the Circle line had dug the station out through archaeological strata of human remains. Liverpool Street, he recalled, was the site of Bedlam, home to generations of lunatics.

Khrushchev sniffed the air.

Soot or madness or death? Troy wondered. Railways always put Troy in mind of Anna Karenina’s death under the wheels of a train. Grace Kelly had never, as far as he knew, played Anna—the version he knew was Garbo’s. That mournful, miserable beauty. The moist smell of the underground, that ancient mixture of soot and humanity, was as strong as the reek of cordite to him, inseparable from the thought of death, the thought of the woman in black laying her head upon the tracks.

Khrushchev’s gaze swept around from the low, dark, dirty roof, across the clutter of signs and posters to the lantern glow of the bar once more. He walked back towards Troy, his short legs shooting out stiffly like a tin soldier’s, and placed his empty glass on the bar.

‘It lacks unity,’ he said.

Unity was an impossibility. Only in the 1930s had it even approached unity and that was in terms of aspects of style. Troy would put it no more strongly than that—Beck’s map, the Nuremberg lighting at Arnos Grove, the modernist lines of the newer stations out along the far reaches of the Piccadilly line. By now, in the mid-fifties, that short burst of style had been absorbed and the true nature of tlie system reasserted itself. There was only one word for it.

‘It’s ramshackle,’ he told Khrushchev. ‘But it works.’

‘It works, but can you be proud of it?’

‘I don’t think Londoners think of it with pride. I doubt whether they think of it at all.’

‘Why not?’ he said. ‘A little awe for the works of men would not be out of place. You have cathedrals and palaces galore. Where is the palace of the people? What is the palace of the people if not a railway station?’

Troy had no answer as yet, and fielded Khrushchev’s question with one of his own that had been nagging at him for quarter of an hour.

‘What is it you can smell? You’ve done that at every place we stopped.’

Khrushchev breathed in deeply.

‘Soot,’ he said. ‘Soot and . . . and . . . despair.’

Troy looked out towards the tunnel, to the drizzling misery of a black night in London. For so long now it had struck him as some makeshift shanty, shabbytown, shorn of all pride, laid bare, without dignity. But despair? How had Khrushchev noticed that? Where had he seen it—where, since it seemed his operational mode, had he smelt it? Was this what the national odour of wet gabardine spelt out to the perceptive nose?

‘Soot,’ Khrushchev said again. ‘And despair . . . and someone frying bacon.’

He wanted Khrushchev to see Stepney Green. After his outburst to the Labour Party on the matter of who had done what in the war, it was fitting that he should see some of what London had been through. They left the underground at Whitechapel. By the Blind Beggar, a pub gaining a reputation for trouble, and deemed by Troy to be highly unsuitable for the experiment they were essaying, they crossed over the Mile End Road. At the junction of Hannibal Road and Stepney Green they turned right, down the side of the Green, past the London Jewish Hospital and rows of abandoned houses—windowless, some floorless, with the zigzag shadows of collapsed staircases scorched onto the walls and blackened hearths stranded halfway up without rooms to wrap them—and out into the blitzed remains of Cardigan Street.

It had not occurred to Troy before that every other street in this neck of the woods was named after one aspect or another of the last war Britain had actually fought with Russia—unless you counted Murmansk, which Troy did not and Khrushchev surely would. The importance of Stepney Green to Troy was that it was as flat today as the day Hitler had levelled it in 1940. Hundreds of homes blown to dust. Thousands of lives lost, many, many more disrupted and displaced. This corner of the East End had never recovered from the Blitz, had never retrieved its people from the dispersal of the war, nor reclaimed its identity in the peace. It was grassed over now, but to Troy the lines of rubble were still visible beneath the wilderness of green. As Troy told him this Khrushchev nodded, said nothing. Just looked and sighed. At last he said, ‘I saw Stalingrad. I saw Moscow. I was there when we took back Lvov.’

It was not a had-it-worse-than-thou comparison. The sadness in his tone told Troy it was identification. He’d known the solid world to dissolve about him, the permanence of life to crumble in the dust of war.

‘You should rebuild,’ he said. ‘I noticed from the train last week. And around St Paul’s. So much of London is like this. I find it hard to see why. The Germans level our cities; we rebuild them. We house our people.’

Troy felt almost in need of Brother Rod, who could give Khrushchev chapter and verse ad tedium on Britain’s failure to rebuild and rehouse in the aftermath of war. They walked along Balaclava Street towards the end of Jamaica Street. A huge chimney stack lay on its side like a slaughtered Titan. It had fallen almost intact, back broken like a ship run aground, but not shattered. Troy had no idea when. It had been standing the last time he looked, but that had been years ago. He usually avoided this route, almost unconsciously. It must have been five or six years since he had walked this way. Twenty years ago, as a beat bobby, he walked it every day. He found it hard to admit, but the place held too many memories.

‘Do the English keep their bombsites as monuments?’ Khrushchev asked. Troy had never looked at it this way before, but silently agreed that that was exactly what they did. Their finest hour laid out in blasted brick and broken glass. And when they were fed up with them as monuments, they turned them into car parks.

It had turned chilly. The warmth as Troy pushed open the door into the Bricklayer’s Arms was welcoming. The people’s palace sounded to Troy like a good name for a defunct music hall. He thought the notion that it could be reapplied to a railway station, any railway station, an absurd piece of Soviet pseudo-realism. If anything the people’s palaces were public houses. In their relentless, unvarying shades, dirty red, dirty brown, they were, he thought, some sort of refuge from the cloying English privacy, the world behind the rustling lace curtains, and an escape from the new invader, the one-eyed god of the living room. The public bar was half full at best. Monday was hardly the best night of the week for an evening in a pub, nor was Tuesday, most people being flat broke from the weekend, lacking the courage to run up a slate until pay day—Friday—was visible in the near future—but it would have to do.

‘Before we go in,’ Troy said to his companion, ‘I should warn you. It’s Monday. Don’t expect cheerful cockneys doing the Lambeth Walk and the Hokey-Cokey.’

‘Hokey-Cokey,’ said Khrushchev. ‘What is Hokey-Cokey?’

‘Forget it,’ Troy said. ‘It’s too difficult to explain.’

And so saying concealed the truth, that he’d no real idea what it was himself.

The pub had hardly changed since the end of the war, it was if anything simply ten years shabbier, ten years deeper into its nicotine hue. Most noticeably, the spot behind the bar where Churchill’s photograph had hung for so long was now occupied by one of the footballer Tom Finney, star of Preston North End, a suitably neutral team on turf naturally split between Millwall and West Ham and, as it happened, the hometown of Eric the landlord, a man who had been known to crack heads over the matter of local loyalties.

Troy found Bonham at a corner table playing cribbage with two other men. He introduced Khrushchev as Uncle Nikki. Bonham looked down at Khrushchev from his six foot six plus and scrutinised him.

‘No he’s not,’ he said. ‘I know your Uncle Nikki. He’s a little fat bloke with a beard.’

‘Well, this is a little fat bloke without a beard,’ Troy said. ‘This is my Uncle Nikki on my mother’s side. And he doesn’t speak English.’

‘Good Eefenning,’ said Khrushchev. ‘Good Eefenning to you oll.’

‘Well, that’s his limit,’ Troy said.

‘A pleasure to meet you,’ Khrushchev went on.

‘Mutual,’ Bonham replied and moved up the bench to make room for him. He looked at Troy.

‘Are you quite sure?’ he said.

Troy sat down opposite Khrushchev. ‘It’s just phrases, that’s all. He picks up the odd thing.’

‘Mind the gap!’ said Khrushchev, smiling at his own parrotry.

Bonham looked quizzically at Troy. ‘Are you two having me on?’

‘Honestly,’ Troy protested. ‘It’s just phrases.’

‘Sounds pretty damn kosher to me,’ said Bonham. ‘I think you’d better get them in, Freddie.’

Over a pint of best—Troy had no idea where Khrushchev had learnt ‘wallop’—they taught him the rudiments of cribbage. Khrushchev paid enough attention to pass muster but was clearly far more interested in the players than the play. Next to Troy sat Alf and Stanley, a docker and a jobbing carpenter respectively. From Alf Khrushchev learnt of the power of the trades union and the way they had wrestled a decent standard of living from their employers before the war under the leadership of Ernest Bevin. Khrushchev’s eyebrows rose a fraction at the mention of the name. From Stanley he learnt of the uncertainties of casual labour on the building sites east of the Lea Valley, of tax-cheating cash in hand, no insurance and no questions asked, and of the long lay-offs when no houses were built and no carpenters required. The reassuring proof, the quick quick slow of capitalism’s inherent cycle of boom and slump.

The kitten’s boundless curiosity humanised Khrushchev. The nutty brown eyes sparkled; the fat, fleshy lips parted in a revealing gap-tooth smile that needed only to chomp on a cigarette holder to look just like Roosevelt’s famous letterbox grin. Khrushchev delved into everything, asked about their families, their wives, the education of their children, and of course, he asked them how they voted and what they thought of their leaders. They were both solidly Labour, but Gaitskell was a mystery to them, too new a leader to have made any definite impression. Eden, Stanley told him, was a joke, a living anachronism. Why not, Alf retorted, the whole country was one ‘bleedin’ great anachronism’—were they living in 1926 or 1956? Bonham said he felt quite certain that life was better. There had been, he declared, progress. Lots of it.

‘What do you mean?’ Alf asked. ‘Washing machines? Fridges?’ And spitting contempt, ‘The telly?’

‘National Health Service?’ said Stanley. ‘Ain’t that progress? Heard the one about the National Health Service?’

Alf groaned. Who had not heard the National Health joke? Only Troy’s newfound Uncle Nikki. Troy dutifully translated it for Khrushchev, rendering Stanley’s poor version of Max Miller as precisely as he could.

‘This bloke on the building site. Comes in every morning, picks up a full sack of cement, grunting fit to burst, then throws it down. Next day, does the same thing, and the next day and the day after that. Eventually one of his mates comes over and says, “Bert, why do you fling a full sack of cement around first thing each morning?” “Well,” says Bert, “I pays me stamp to the Government every week, and I’ve had me free pair o’ specs and I’ve had me free set of false teeth—I’ll be buggered if I won’t get me free truss as well.”’

Khrushchev laughed. It might well have been the funniest joke the man had ever heard. He threw back his head and roared, slapped the table with the flat of his hand and hooted with laughter.

It was almost ten-thirty. Troy felt exhausted. He dearly wished they could call it a night. He had never guessed that being an interpreter for the nosiest man alive would prove so taxing. Nor would he have anticipated that the dialogue Khrushchev had sought so keenly would have touched himself so little. He added next to nothing of his own to the litany of complaint—the great British whine—that Alf, dejected middle ager, and Stan, frustrated youth, poured out for Khrushchev’s benefit. It was left to Bonham to offer the inadequacies of moderation, the unconvincing reassurance that we had emerged from the world war with ‘fings better than wot they was’ and that ‘never again’ would we suffer the tribulations of the thirties. Troy had no heart for such argument, and when Stan aired his view that he’d be ‘better off in America’, that it was ‘years ahead of us, years’, and that he’d ‘be off like a shot’ if he’d the price of the passage, he rendered it precisely and neutrally and watched the glint in Khrushchev’s eyes.

‘Is this your Britain?’ he asked of Troy. ‘The forty-ninth state, a nation of second-rate, would-be Americans? Do you all want to be Americans?’

The Bricklayer’s Arms, like many local pubs, closed when the last policeman in the bar chose to go home. On the dot of ten-thirty, far from calling last orders, Eric the landlord came round to collect empties and fresh orders.

‘Where’s the little feller tonight?’ Eric asked.

‘What little feller?’ said Troy.

‘That little feller,’ Bonham said, pointing off over Troy’s shoulder. Troy squirmed round in his seat. At the bar was a short, ugly man in a heavy black overcoat, glistening with raindrops, Homburg pushed back on his head, News Chronicle sticking out of his pocket. If there was one man in London Troy could have done without tonight, it was Ladislaw Konradovitch Kolankiewicz. Polish exile, Senior Pathologist for the Home Office, one of the finest minds at the Yard’s disposal, and the most foul-mouthed, bloody-minded, cantankerous creature ever to walk the earth.

‘Oh God,’ Troy said to Bonham. ‘What’s he doing here?’

‘Mondays and Thursdays. Our regular crib nights. He’s been coming for about five years now.’

‘Why didn’t you warn me!’

Too late. Kolankiewicz had picked up his pint and was walking towards them, quizzically scrutinising Khrushchev. He sat down next to Troy.

‘Inch up, smartyarse.’

Then he paused to suck the foam off his pint, all the time staring at Khrushchev across the rim of the glass. He set it down.

‘Who’s the new boy?’ he asked.

‘It’s Fred’s Uncle Nikki,’ Bonham volunteered.

‘I know your Uncle Nikki, he’s a little fat bloke with a beard.’

‘A different Uncle Nikki. On my mother’s side,’ Troy said, and dropping his voice to a whisper he leaned in close to Kolankiewicz.

‘Listen, you Polish pig. If you fuck this up, I don’t care how many years you’ve got left till retirement, but I’ll see to it you never get another good body from the Yard as long as you live. I’ll have you scraping the mud off the soles of suspicious boots for the rest of your days. The nearest you’ll ever get to a corpse is your own funeral. Do I make myself clear?’

Kolankiewicz hadn’t even looked at Troy. He took another inch off his pint and spoke directly to Khrushchev in flawless Russian.

‘Nice to meet you, Uncle Nikki. It’s not often I get the chance of a chat with a relative of Troy’s.’

On the final phrase he turned to Troy and grinned the grin of the Cheshire cat.

Bonham scraped in the cards and dished out dominoes. The rules were simple enough. Only the principle of knocking required anything by way of explanation from Troy. Bonham took the first game; Khrushchev the second. He smiled gently, but he had stopped asking questions in the presence of Kolankiewicz. One round into the third Kolankiewicz raised his fist as though about to knock on to Khrushchev, then he unfolded it and one by one set his remaining dominoes on end.

‘East Germany,’ he said, reverting to Russian, as he set up the first. ‘Czechoslovakia.’ Up went the second. ‘Hungary, Poland, Lithuania.’

He ran out of dominoes, looked across at Khrushchev for the first time since the play had passed to him, clenched his fist again, and tapping it lightly with the forefinger of his left hand said in a hoarse whisper, ‘Soviet Union!’ The fist crashed down to the table, and the dominoes toppled down one by one. Lithuania took out Poland, Poland took out Hungary, Hungary took out Czechoslovakia and Czechoslovakia walloped East Germany. He looked into Khrushchev’s eyes and said softly and, it seemed to Troy, almost sweetly, ‘One man’s buffer zone is another man’s home.’

In his heart Troy had always known he was not the stuff that heroes are made of. Pleasing, flattering to his vanity though the idea was, it was always going to be someone else who lit Khrushchev’s fuse. That the someone should be Kolankiewicz, the Polish beast, the most rough-hewn of heroes, was wholly appropriate. He should have known that no threat, however uttered, would deter him. He waited for the explosion, for Khrushchev to erupt in a furious spurt of Russian cursing. Bonham and his mates looked baffled, having no idea what Kolankiewicz had said by way of preface to the gesture.

Khrushchev smiled back at Kolankiewicz, laid a six and three against Troy’s six and one and passed to Bonham. Bonham studied his hand for what seemed an age, and finally knocked gently. The game went full circle, punctuated only by the banal chatter of play. Troy won, and as Bonham scooped up the dominoes in his colossal paws, found Khrushchev looking straight at him.

‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘Do you suppose they serve vodka in this place?’

‘Almost certainly,’ Troy answered. ‘It’s immigrant territory. I should think they have Genever and Schnapps too if they’re to your taste.’

‘Vodka will do. Poland and I clearly have things to discuss that can only be thrashed out over vodka. Perhaps you would have two glasses—large ones—sent over.’

With that he beckoned to Kolankiewicz and moved to an empty table by the Jug and Bottle. Kolankiewicz looked at Troy. Sheepishly, Troy thought. Troy had never known Kolankiewicz hesitant in his life—­sheepish he was not—where angels feared to tread he was usually to be found in residence, having rushed in hours before with a camp bed, a shooting stick and a full thermos.

‘Go on,’ Troy said. ‘It’s what you wanted. It’s certainly what you asked for.’

An hour or so later, heading back to the West End in a taxi, Troy said, ‘What did you and Kolankiewicz talk about?’

Khrushchev was staring out of the window again into the night and drizzle. He did not turn around.

‘Oh, this and that,’ he said with the stifling of a yawn in his voice. ‘We redrew the map of Europe. What else should happen when a Russian and a Pole get together?’

‘I thought that line went “a Russian and a German”?’

‘Germans,’ Khrushchev replied, ‘are like policemen. Never one around when you want one.’

§13

It was one in the morning before Troy turned in at Goodwin’s Court. He hung up the leather holster and the Browning on the bedstead and threw his shirt into the laundry basket. The gun had left an oily stain on the shirt, the shape of a tiny heart, right over his heart. He declined to see a symbol in it and fell into bed. Before he could even switch off the lamp the phone was ringing. It had to be Cobb.

‘You didn’t report in, Mr Troy,’ he said. ‘Where’ve you been?’

‘Pubs,’ said Troy simply and honestly.

‘The procedure, I should not have to remind you, is that everyone logs off with me. Not four hours later, but when they hand over Red Pig.’

Troy hated this addiction the man had for code words. Why couldn’t he say ‘Khrushchev’? The pretence of secrecy was absurd.

‘Sorry,’ he said lamely. ‘Forgot.’

‘Well . . .’ Cobb paused. ‘Anything to report?’

Troy remembered Khrushchev’s ‘Do it’. It puzzled him greatly and was undoubtedly the kind of thing he’d been placed to overhear. But, and there were two buts, Khrushchev had uttered the cryptic two syllables in full knowledge of Troy’s command of the language, and, but the second, to tell Cobb anything now would be to invite his curiosity about the entire evening, when it was best that he asked no more and learnt no more. Troy was confident that their jaunt had—Kolankiewicz apart—gone undetected. He’d been, as Clark had pointed out, very lucky. The last thing he wanted was Cobb nosing around.

‘No,’ he lied. ‘Not a damn thing.’

‘Really? I heard there was quite a to-do at the Commons.’

‘There was, but as it all took place in public, indeed in the presence of a sizeable gathering of our lords and masters, I hardly saw it as a matter of any secrecy or importance. Or am I now spying on George Brown and Nye Bevan as well Khrushchev and Bulganin?’

The irritation in Troy’s voice produced the desired effect.

‘Play it by the book, will you, Mr Troy!’ Cobb snapped, and then he hung up.

Troy put out the light, still wondering what Khrushchev and Kolankiewicz had said to each other.

§14

The following day he accompanied Khrushchev to the Strangers’ Gallery at the House of Commons. A Tory MP, a man whose hobby seemed to be the Russian language, sat in as interpreter, and for once Khrushchev seemed genuinely interested by the farce that was democracy. At the best of times Prime Minister’s Question Time could be like a bear pit, the semblance of English manners tossed to the wind—surely something any Russian could identify with? Khrushchev warmed to the occasion, upstaged the clowns in the pit by taking a bow every time someone looked up and recognised him, as though the cry of ‘author author!’ had gone up from the stalls. It was an anodyne session until Troy saw Rod get to his feet from the Labour front bench.

‘Will the Prime Minister inform the House of what arms Her Majesty’s Government have supplied to Egypt and Israel?’

Eden rose to answer him. Khrushchev looked sideways at Troy, seated on the far side of Bulganin.

Eden invoked security and declared that he could not answer the question. Rod rose with his supplementaries.

Khrushchev stopped playing the showman, became attentive to the line of questioning—as well he might. It was a drama in which he made many of the noises off. Colonel Nasser was rapidly assuming the proportions of a cult figure among the Arabs. He had asserted the simple truth that the old imperial powers had no business in Egypt or any part of the Arab world, and offered his vision of a Pan-Arabia stretching from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, from Morocco to Aden. He was held to be hostile in the extreme towards Britain, a nation which fondly flattered itself that it had done rather a lot for ‘Johnny Arab’—indeed there were those who thought we had done rather too much in giving him the financial aid he’d requested for his hydroelectric dam across the Nile. Troy knew—Rod left no stone unturned when he wanted you to know—that this was a cynical ploy to keep Nasser out of the Soviet camp, and were it not for the prospect of a fat Russian bankroll, the moths would have stayed zipped up in the British purse. But that was part of the national failing—the white man’s failing.

The British could not accept that they had no role in Egypt, as though to give away the Raj were quite enough for one day, or in Cyprus, whose Greek population were fighting the British in the streets for union with Greece—hardly a day went by without news of some British tommy being bumped off in Nicosia or Larnaca—or in Africa, where British Imperial jails were stuffed to the gills with men who one day would surely lead their countries, and more likely than not face their former captors across the table with more than a hint of resentment. For their part, the French had withdrawn ignominiously from Viet Nam and were looking to restore national prestige by taking it out on the Algerians. Sore winners the French. Along the borders of Israel—a country less than ten years old—and almost every other Arab state, were frequent skirmishes, spelling out, to those who watched, the possibility of imminent war. Only last month young Hussein, the Sandhurst- and Harrow-educated King of Jordan, had sacked Glubb P˙asha, the British General of the Arab Legion, saying that his values, like his policies, were Victorian. Nasser had a point. Rod, Troy knew, rather admired the man. But the life he led demanded, if not outright duplicity, then from time to time devil’s advocacy. Troy looked at Khrushchev to see if he steamed, as Rod, smiling wickedly, asked Eden if he would restore the balance of power by giving Israel as much in the way of weaponry as the Soviet Union had given Egypt.

Again Eden would not be drawn. Troy wondered how little the man had got away with telling the Russians.

In the evening the Russian Embassy returned the astringent British hospitality with a formal reception. Troy knew what this meant. The embassy would never admit armed coppers, any more than MI5 would let armed KGB agents escort B & K, as the papers had dubbed them, around London. They’d spend a boring evening cooling their heels in an anteroom with a silent KGB guard for company. The bulge in Clark’s pocket was undoubtedly a book with which to while away the time. Troy had finished The Secret Agent, and forgotten to pick up a newspaper. Clark was never caught out by boredom.

They handed B & K over to the embassy staff and waited for instructions. Troy watched his charges vanish into the throng of Russians awaiting their first guests, and saw a tall, thin young man heading towards him.

‘Gentlemen,’ he began. ‘Tereshkov. Anton Tereshkov. Comrade Khrushchev has informed me that you are all to be our guests. If you would be so kind as to surrender your weapons to me, you may join the reception.’

Clark and Milligan looked at Troy, waiting for their cue.

‘Go ahead,’ he said. ‘I doubt there’s anything about a service-issue Browning they haven’t known for years.’

They handed over their weapons like schoolboys parting with illicit catapults. Troy fished his own gun out of the absurd contraption that stuck it sharply up his armpit and gave it to Tereshkov.

‘A word, if I may, Chief Inspector.’

Troy gestured Clark and Milligan away, and they moved slowly and suspiciously into the crowd, glancing back at Troy and looking like two coppers reluctantly pursuing a suspect into a ladies’ lavatory.

Tereshkov took Troy by the arm, gently swung him around into the kind of huddle presumed to exclude other ears.

‘Chief Inspector. Comrade Khrushchev has invited you to visit the Soviet Union.’

Good grief, thought Troy, the old fool had actually meant it.

‘There are complications,’ Troy said, trying for tact. ‘I’m grateful, but I really think it won’t be possible.’

‘The British would object? It would destroy the career of a Special Branch officer?’

‘No, the British would not object. And I’m not in the Branch. I run the Murder Squad at Scotland Yard. It’s more personal. Do you see?’

‘I see, Chief Inspector Troy, only as much as you wish me to see. However, the invitation stands. Comrade Khrushchev seems alarmed at the idea that you have never seen your homeland and extends his personal, his personal invitation to you. All you have to do is let him know through the embassy that you wish to come, and the necessary papers will be arranged by the office of the First Secretary in Moscow.’

‘Do you really think the KGB will forward a letter from an English copper to the ruler of the Soviet Union?’ Troy asked, more than a little incredulous.

Tereshkov took a notebook from his pocket and jotted down a word in Russian—Пирожки. Pirozhki. Literally, it meant fried dumplings. He tore off the page and gave it to Troy. Troy could not help feeling that the man whose job it was to think these things up was secretly taking the mickey.

‘I am Comrade Khrushchev’s man here. Any letter dropped into the embassy letterbox bearing this code will be sent straight to me, and by me straight to the First Secretary. No one else will know its content. Whatever dark secret you and your people are hiding—from us or the British—will be quite safe.’

But, of course, Troy had no idea what he was hiding. Whatever it was it had been hidden by his father long ago. To entertain Khrushchev’s invitation as anything more than whimsy on the part of a mercurial old man was to risk ripping the lid off a can of worms. Since his father’s death in 1943 not a week had passed when Troy had not wished him alive for five minutes to answer one question or another, and with every year that passed the list grew longer.

Far from being blown by the night at the Commons, Troy’s cover, and hence the cover of the team as a whole, seemed intact. Khrushchev made no further use of his knowledge that they were all spies. This confirmed Troy’s belief that the mission was hopeless from the start. He had thought all along that Khrushchev would never be indiscreet in the presence of the English. He now blustered and joked and raged in Russian, well aware that they all understood him, and dutifully paused for his interpreter as though the charade were real. The tasteless jokes resumed, the boundless curiosity pretended it was sated by more meetings with living monuments, more official statements, more damned statistics.

He did not speak directly to Troy again. They lurched through a manic schedule that seemed designed to put Khrushchev in an early grave. He was, Troy thought, becoming tired, bored and irritated. This resulted in petulance, boyish behaviour teetering on the brink of a boyish tantrum. An evening of Margot Fonteyn at Covent Garden did nothing to lift his spirits, and the next day that which Troy had expected for some time happened. Khrushchev stamped his foot and told the Foreign Office to ‘Stuff your trip to Calder Hall up your collective arse!’ The interpreter, for once, showed tact and told the chinless wonder from the FO that perhaps a visit to the Atomic Research Establishment was not possible after all. The FO expressed their regrets and took it on the chin. Anyone, thought Troy, among those awful types at the FO and MI5 who might have suffered from the paranoid delusion that Khrushchev might be anxious to glean every last secret about Britain’s much-vaunted nuclear programme and would have to be watched every second of his trip, might just be dragged back to the reality: the man was bored by Britain and the British. Perhaps the obvious was surfacing? We had no secrets the Russians did not know about. Or were the spooks-and-powers-that-be incapable of reading the contempt that ran through Khrushchev’s refusal?

§15

On the dockside Troy waited with an assembly of nobs in the chill wind of April. The sky was ominously grey, just like the ship, and the papers were still moaning about a drought this summer. The Ordzhonikidze moved off at a snail’s pace, towering above them like a block of flats on casters, the Russian band on the deck blew its tuneless military pomp and the wind sucked the notes out of the air. Bulganin and Khrushchev stood and waved like the Soviet version of The Last of England. Cheerless and frumpish as May Day on Lenin’s tomb. Today was the day of the fawn mackintosh, the dark trilby, and contempt for matching accessories. Troy could not but believe that they were glad to be off these islands.

Suddenly Khrushchev approached the rail, whipped off his hat, leaned out, looked straight at Troy and yelled with all his might. ‘Bugger England!’ he cried. ‘Come to Russia. Distance doesn’t matter. Come where we still have some spirit!’ Then he threw in an idiomatic, ‘Держи хвост пистолетом!’—the sort of thing one said to cheer up a miserable child, slouching home after a pasting from the school bully—‘Hold your tail like a pistol’—which had an approximate English equivalent in ‘Keep your pecker up.’

Troy glanced around. In the long minutes of waiting for the ship to cast off, the nobs had chatted and drifted. He was, he realised, closer to the Ordzhonikidze than anyone but the Foreign Secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, who was standing right next to him. The Russian ambassador, in protocol Lloyd’s escort and vice versa, somehow had ended up about twenty feet behind them.

‘Что, Что?’ Troy heard him say. ‘I couldn’t understand a word of that.’

Lloyd was looking baffled.

‘It’s for you, Foreign Secretary,’ he lied. ‘Comrade Khrushchev is telling you to come and see him in Russia.’ He thought on his toes, cutting and pasting what Khrushchev had said into some semblance of diplomacy. ‘Physical distance is nothing, spiritual distances are what matter. He tells you to’—Troy searched for something better than ‘keep your pecker up’, something utterly without ambiguity or innuendo—‘to keep your heart healthy.’

‘Healthy?’

‘Pure. He means pure. It’s an old Russian aphorism.’

He glanced at the ambassador once more. The man was cocking a hand to his ear and still muttering ‘Что?’ ‘What?’

‘Oh dear,’ said Lloyd. ‘These aphorisms. Why can’t we have a few of our own. Er . . . er . . . Tell Mr Khrushchev . . . er . . . to put his hat on. It’s rather cold. I’d hate to think of him catching cold.’

Pathetic, thought Troy. Lloyd smiled. Pleased with his own powers of invention. Troy yelled his translation back to Khrushchev. Khrushchev roared with laughter. Troy just made out a cry of ‘Bugger England!’ before the ship swung its bows seaward and he vanished from sight.

§16

Troy was back at the Yard in good time. The day had cleared wonderfully. By four-thirty of a beautiful spring afternoon he had had quite enough of paperwork and was gazing idly at the sunlight glinting on the Thames beneath his window. It was, he thought, almost identical to the view his brother Rod had from his office in the Palace of Westminster, a couple of hundred yards upriver. Out of office since 1951, Rod was a dutiful constituency MP. Often of a Friday evening he would call Troy in the hope of scrounging a lift down to the Hertfordshire mansion that his father had bought on his arrival in England in 1910. Troy wandered over to the Commons, down the tunnel that connected the underground to Westminster, past a tired, Fridayish constable, saluting him in the most perfunctory fashion, and up the staircase to the office Rod, as Shadow Foreign Secretary, occupied on the south side.

The door was open. Rod was in shirt-sleeves, obligatory red tie at half-mast, also looking very Fridayish, and rummaging about among a vast acreage of papers on his desktop. Troy leaned in the doorway, looking at the clutter in which Rod seemed to like to work. The dark panelling and the huge gothic Thameside window were a Tennysonian, a Burne-Jonesy mock-mediæval, softened, humanised, almost modernised by the paraphernalia Rod accumulated around him. The window-seat cover his mother-in-law had sewn for him, the knitted tea cosy stuck in the in-tray, the sentimental relics of his kids’ childhood—school photos, discarded mittens, outgrown caps, a one-armed teddy bear—all fighting with green-and-white Government papers for space atop the bookshelves. The personal and the political intermixed, crowned by a full outfit for a three-year-old, topcoat, bonnet, bootees and red Labour rosette included, hanging from the picture rail like the skin of some exotic insect long since turned into a more exotic butterfly. The butterfly was Alexander, Rod’s eldest, now all of nineteen and far from butterfly-like. A big, robust man like his father. Not unlike Troy in looks but built on a grander scale. Rod was the best part of six foot, going grey, going gently to seed at forty-eight and looking, as Troy had thought just the other night, distinctly portly.

Rod heard the thought and looked up at him.

‘I suppose,’ he said, returning his gaze to the papers and the desk, ‘that you’ve come to tell me I buggered up your week?’

‘No. I haven’t and you didn’t. As a matter of fact it all worked out rather well. And I came, incidentally, to offer you a lift home.’

‘Who’s driving?’

‘I am.’

Rod found what he was looking for and tossed the corkscrew at Troy.

‘Good. Open a bottle. Your week may have been fine. I’ve just sat through a stinker.’

Troy opened the cupboard next to the fireplace and pulled out a bottle from what Rod called his ‘stash’—the legacy of the late Alexei Troy—enough château-bottled wine to last a man a lifetime or two. Troy picked the nearest. A Gevrey-Chambertin 1938.

‘It probably escaped your notice while you were out playing the spy, but it was budget week. I’ve just spent several days cooling my arse on the front bench, watching Harold Macmillan wipe the floor with us.’

Troy poured and handed the first glass to his brother. Rod sat on the window-seat watching the last of the sun and took up his litany of complaint once more.

‘He’s such a flash bastard. The only thing he didn’t do was juggle the despatch box and the mace.’

Troy sipped at his glass. He’d no idea, nor had Rod, how long such wine kept. It tasted fine. He joined Rod in the window, wondering why he was so ratty. Rod’s disposition was ordinarily so even; he was, Troy accepted, most of the time a remarkably well-balanced man.

‘It’s so bloody frustrating. Watching him, and not being able to get up and have a go.’

‘You don’t want the Chancellor’s job, do you?’

‘Want it? Of course I don’t bloody want it. Who in their right mind would give up the Foreign brief now? Just when your new friend has made it quite possibly the most interesting job on the front bench?’

‘You mean Khrushchev?’

‘Of course I mean Khrushchev! If he goes on kicking over the traces in this way we’ll be running to keep up with him. Stalin never sets foot outside Russia except to pow-wow with Churchill. Khrushchev tours like Liberace. That’s the beauty of the Foreign job—wondering what the bugger’s going to do next.’

Rod looked at Troy, as though expecting Troy to answer the implicit question.

‘Well,’ Troy said, silently wondering what Khrushchev had told Kolankiewicz, ‘he didn’t tell me.’

Rod drained his glass and held it out for the refill.

‘But you did talk to him, didn’t you?’

The glint reappeared in his eyes, the irritation of the day deserting him in a wine-red flush of nosiness.

‘Perhaps,’ Troy said coyly.

‘Perhaps my backside. Out with it!’

‘Well . . . I did get the chance of a bit of a chat.’

‘I suppose you gave him your usual jaundiced view of the country? Did he realise you were spying on him?’

‘Of course. He’s not stupid.’

Troy paused, wondering how much he dare tell Rod. The trip to the East End, and the jaundiced views of the British working man, had better stay a secret. But there was no harm in recounting the old boy’s views. He had aired them so freely as they rode the cab back to Claridge’s.

‘He as good as told me he thought Eden was mad.’

‘As good as?’

Troy raised his left hand to his temple.

‘He tapped the side of his head. Very much the gesture our grandfather used to use when he thought someone was a bit crazy. Then he said Eden was a few grains short of a bushel—which I took to be some sort of peasant aphorism or something he’d made up to sound like a peasant aphorism.’

Rod glugged his wine, and stared at the river for a moment.

‘Good Lord,’ he said softly. ‘I would not have credited a man of such obvious bluster with such acute perception. He’s quite right, of course, Eden is barking. I’ve thought so for a while now. Absolutely barking bloody mad. There’s talk he won’t last the term. I’ve bet Nye Bevan a tenner Macmillan will lead the Tories into the next election. He’s backing Rab Butler.’

‘And,’ Troy went on, ‘I know for a fact Eden buttonholed the Russians over Egypt. Tried a bit of armtwisting to get them to stay out of whatever rumpus is brewing out there. I heard Bulganin and Khrushchev rehashing it.’

Rod leaned his head back against the panelling and sighed gently.

‘Ye gods and little fishes. Then he really is barking. It’s the last subject I would have raised with them. Why give them the impression we’re going to invade? The send-a-gunboat days are over. If he doesn’t know that then our Prime Minister is the last man in England who hasn’t heard.’

Troy made and cared nothing of this.

‘And,’ he pressed on, ‘Khrushchev invited me to Russia.’

‘Bloody hell! You must go. He invited Gaitskell. If he’d asked me I’d have been off like a shot.’

‘Don’t be silly, Rod. I can’t go to Russia. Nor can you.’

‘Why the hell not? There’s nowhere on earth I’d rather go. And with Mr K’s personal invitation you could escape the usual InTourist rubbish.’

‘We can’t go—either of us,’ Troy said firmly. ‘It simply isn’t on.’

‘Freddie, I spent my entire childhood listening to tales of the old country. Do you think I’d throw up a chance to finally see it for myself? I had to give Khrushchev that list of political prisoners. It was duty. But I knew damn well I was queering the pitch for myself as a visitor. If he’s asked you, you have to go.’

‘It’s because I spent childhood listening to the old man and his old man blather on about the old country that I can’t go. It’s not a real place any more. It’s a myth now. I’d rather keep it that way. It could never measure up. There’s things back there I’d rather not know.’

‘Such as?’ Rod shot back, and Troy realised for the first time that he had embarked upon a conversation that could have no other result than Rod cornering him. He should have seen where it was leading.

He drew a deep breath and told Rod what he had put off telling him on a dozen other occasions.

‘You remember when I was in Berlin in ’48?’

‘Could I ever forget?’

Troy ignored this.

‘While I was there I met a KGB agent. A Pole I’d been investigating in London. He knew more about me than I did about him. He told me that the old man had been a Soviet agent all along.’

Rod slowly got up and crossed to the desk and the phone. He dialled and waited a few seconds for his wife to answer.

‘Cid, I’m going to be late,’ he said. ‘Absolutely unavoidable. I’ll come home with Freddie just as soon as I can. He’s driving us down.’

He paused while his wife said something Troy could not make out. Then he hung up and resumed his seat in the window.

‘Right, you bugger. Let’s hear it.’

‘You just did,’ said Troy.

‘That’s it? That’s the lot?’

‘I thought it was quite enough, myself.’

‘Some KGB spook collars you in Berlin and tells you your father was a spy. And you believe him?’

‘I didn’t say that. I thought about it. In fact, I still think about it. Most of the time I don’t know what to believe. Sometimes I find it easy to believe it isn’t true. I’ve never yet come to the point of believing it lock, stock and barrel.’

Rod leaned forward to Troy, demanding his attention, playing the big brother and confirming all the reasons Troy had ever had for not telling him what he had just told him.

‘Freddie, it’s preposterous. It makes no sense. No sense at all. The old man opposed Stalinism all through the thirties—even when it was fashionable to be a fellow-traveller he eschewed it. I often worked with him on the editorials for the Herald, and one or two for the Sunday Post. He would have to have been a conman extraordinaire not to have meant what he wrote.’

‘Rod, there’s plenty of people think the old man was a conman, and you have to admit he was certainly extraordinary.’

They had almost reached the bottom of the bottle. Rod pulled another from the cupboard without so much as a glance at the label, and proceeded to oil the wheels once more.

‘You amaze me sometimes, little brother, you really do. How can you have knowledge like this and sit on it, not use it? For Christ’s sake, if it had been me the bugger told I’d’ve come screaming round to your house like my arse was on fire!’

‘I know,’ Troy said simply.

‘How could you not tell me?!?’

‘Because I knew you’d react as you are doing.’

‘Freddie—it’s too important . . .’

‘No it’s not. You don’t believe a word of it, so it can hardly be that important.’

‘Yes it bloody well is . . . It’s . . . it’s undermining.’

‘What?’

‘It’s undermining! I don’t want to be forced to consider that my father’s life might have been a sham. It doesn’t shatter one’s faith in the old man. It chips away at it in a shoddy, petty, corrosive way. He built a life here for himself. And he built one for you and me and the girls. I don’t want to be made to doubt that, and if I doubt him I doubt the life. It’s important to think he was committed to it.’

‘To England?’

‘Yes.’

‘You know what I think of that.’

Rod rose up in rage. Glass in one hand, bottle in the other. He stormed a few paces around the room in his stockinged feet, leaving Troy wondering why Cid never managed to get him to wear matching socks, and returned to his seat, seething with anger and not a drop of wine spilt.

‘You stupid, stupid sod. Let’s not go through that again. We’re English. That’s what he made us. For you to go on raging against the English because you hated their damn schools and you can’t grasp the first rule of their damn silly national game is just plain childish. For God’s sake, Freddie, grow up!’

Of course Rod was right. Troy could not tell silly mid-off from deep leg. It ought to mean nothing, but at times was simply and neatly symbolic of his regard for the English as being other—‘them’ as he was wont to think of them. But on another level he too knew why Rod raged so madly against the idea. England—or rather that part of the English to whom it mattered at all—was still reeling from the defection of Burgess and Maclean the best part of five years ago. The scandal rippled through English society with a resonance and a force out of all proportion to the incident. Only last year some chap named Philby—Kim Philby, Troy recalled, son of the old Arabian explorer St John Philby—had been the subject of a Commons answer by Macmillan to the effect that he was now the third man in the case of Burgess and Maclean; and Philby had followed that with the unprecedented step of calling a press conference, so necessary was it to reinforce the general sense of his innocence in an atmosphere where the notion of a third man had reached the level of an Establishment paranoia. Establishment, there was a word at the heart of the mystery, buried so deep in the unwritten English code it was impossible to define and much of the time impossible to discern. But then the whole affair touched on unwritten codes—unspoken but understood meanings—the grasp of which, the consciousness of which, in Troy’s eyes, was what separated the likes of the Troys from the English proper. Not to be shocked by Burgess and Maclean was to miss a fundamental meaning in post-war English life. As Rod had so succinctly put it, it was like not knowing the rules of cricket. The two errant diplomats had broken the rules, which stated, in the unwritten code of the English, that spies were much more likely to be one of the cloth cap and brown boot brigade—who had, after all, something to gain from the triumph of Communism—than to be ‘one of us’. That the cloth cap and brown boot brigade had nothing and no one to spy on was neither here nor there. That Burgess and Maclean had each been ‘one of us’—although Burgess had managed the neat trick of being flagrantly one of them at the same time as being ‘one of us’—was at the heart of the offence. Contempt. It was what offended Rod now, the thought that their father had made him, and tried to make Troy, ‘one of us’, only to be in utter, secret contempt of the very notion. That was what hurt. That Alexei Troy might just have nurtured the same secret contempt, making fools of them all.

Troy had known Guy Burgess. They had a common friend in Charlie, a common friend in Tom Driberg. Troy had propped up bars in Soho with Guy a dozen times. He was a charming, sometimes outrageous drunk, who blathered about politics and Communism half the time but around whom there lingered not a whiff of ideology. But, then, that was what had so obviously lent conviction to the façade that he was ‘one of us’. The English ideology could be summed up in some wag’s definition of the C of E—‘the creed of the English is that there is no God but that it is wise to pray to him occasionally’. Troy knew that he, Chief Inspector Troy, was not ‘one of us’; he knew that it suited Rod to believe that he, Rodyon Troy Bt. MP, was, but felt that in his heart of hearts Rod knew he too was on the outside.

Troy taunted him, unnecessarily.

‘Why is it causing you such offence?’

‘Offence? Bugger offence. It’s pain. Pain, pain, pain! I am hurt by the idea that the old man could be called a spy. It’s insulting. More insulting than I can find words to express!’

‘Aha?’ said Troy. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve noticed, but you’ve called me a spy at least twice since I walked through the door less than an hour ago.’

‘I have?’

‘Yes.’

Rod was momentarily contemplative. Instantly calmer. They both knew what the next logical remark must be.

‘It’s true in its way, though. Isn’t it?’

‘Yes. I suppose it is. But that’s not why I was there. Whatever they expected of me, I was there for the crack. I knew we’d learn nothing we didn’t know already. If Eden hadn’t told Five and Six to lay off, I’m sure they’d never have clutched at such a straw. As it happens, I was a spy who didn’t spy a thing. My hands are clean!’

‘They didn’t,’ Rod almost whispered.

‘Didn’t what?’

‘Didn’t lay off. They went right ahead and spied on the Russians. They sent a frogman out to inspect the hull of that battleship Khrushchev came in on. The Russian captain made a formal complaint to the FO before he sailed. It was a lot bigger and dirtier than they told you.’

Suddenly Troy was angry. His turn.

‘Eden’s denied it, of course. But you know in your bones it’s true.’

Troy was angrier.

‘Wouldn’t surprise me if you and all the plods in Special Branch were just the decoys.’

Angrier still. He bit on the bullet, and refused to give in to the rage he felt.

‘When?’ he asked. ‘When did this happen?’

‘The word is that the complaint came in on Tuesday morning. The denial was immediate, but my sources say Eden’s been in a paddy ever since because the spooks have admitted it.’

That Rod had ‘sources’ was hardly a surprise. It made perfect sense for Her Majesty’s Civil Service to see to it that Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition knew what the Civil Servants wanted them to know. It was one way of ensuring their loyalty and it was easy enough. The Commons was a vast club, an elective Garrick, the voting man’s Athenaeum. And the mandarins were nothing if not natural clubmen, nodding and winking at their blind horses. After all, Opposition might well be Government in a year or two.

Again Troy could hear Khrushchev saying ‘Do it!’ on the Monday evening. The remark made marginally more sense now than it had at the time. But he had created a situation in which it was now impossible to tell Rod that he had indeed heard something of worth in his spying on the Russian leader—impossible, without branding himself a liar as well as a spy in Rod’s eyes. He realised once more why he so hated spooks and spookery: it clung to fingers, it left a bad taste in the mouth, a nasty smell in the air. All in all he had only himself to blame. He should have known better.

They all but rolled out of Troy’s Bendey in Hampstead. Lucinda Troy took one look at her husband and brother-in-law and demanded the keys to the car. One day, she told them, as she eased herself into the driving seat, there’d be laws against middle-aged men driving pissed to the gills.

§17

Rod had been a toddler of three, the girls babes-in-arms, only weeks old, and Troy himself unthought of, when their father had paid a pittance for the vast Georgian pile that was Mimram House. He had saved the bedrooms from falling into the ground floor and the house itself from crumbling into the eponymous river Mimram. He had turned it into a hybrid of a Russian dacha and an English family home. It had remained that after his death, home to his mother, home from home to the sisters and Rod’s constituency base, until their mother’s death in 1952. Troy had been, as he himself saw it, at best a visitor. To everyone’s surprise, not least Troy’s, Maria Mikhailovna had left the house to Troy, stating simply in her will that it was only right as he was her last unmarried child with no family home of his own. This to Troy confirmed what she thought of his terraced house in Goodwin’s Court, which she had always contemptuously referred to as his ‘bachelor residence’, as though it would serve only until he too married. There was little prospect of that, and even his sisters, those indefatigable romantics, had long given up the game of matchmaking. He had hesitated, had almost passed the house back to Rod. He had come to think of himself as a Londoner. He had been there since the thirties. He had witnessed the privations of the war there, and the worse privations of the peace. But in the end he had accepted that there was a certain appeal to claiming the family seat. It would never be wholly his—Rod needed it most weekends, and nothing short of a moat could keep out a determined sister—and hence the responsibility need not be the millstone about his neck that at first glance it might seem. He could indulge a dream. He had long wanted to keep a pig and grow vegetables. And to his own surprise he had done things his younger self would never have dreamt of. He took weekends and holidays as weekends and holidays. Before cases out of London, he would let Onions bribe him with the promise of days off. After cases out of London, he would let Onions reward him with days off. He spent summer evenings in the country, motoring down just for the night, and rising at first light to be back at the Yard. He had come to look upon Mimram House as a pleasurable retreat, although retreat from what he could not say.

§18

He awoke on the Saturday morning to the promise of breakfast in bed, followed by a stroll down to the pig pens. He was sitting up in bed with a cup of coffee and the morning paper when Rod opened his bedroom door. Troy could tell from his expression that he had just a tinge of guilt, the nagging self-doubt that perhaps he had overdone it and made an ass of himself. Unlike Troy, Rod could never hold a grudge. He had nothing to feel guilty about, but guilt he could hold aplenty. He looked immaculate, freshly scrubbed and shaved, three-piece suit and a shine to his shoes, ready to meet his electorate and suffer their complaints.

‘You haven’t told the girls what you told me yesterday, have you?’ he asked.

‘No,’ said Troy. ‘Why should I? Can’t wear it, can’t fuck it. They wouldn’t know what to do with it.’

‘A deeply cynical attitude, if I may say so.’

Rod left. Nothing on earth would have induced Troy to tell his sisters. Their dismissive indifference would have been far harder to bear than Rod’s absurd guilt. He went back to his newspaper, to the news of the departure of B & K, and a near-verbatim account of Khrushchev’s last words to the Foreign Secretary. Some Fleet Street hack must have been closer than he thought. Except that they weren’t Khrushchev’s last words, they were Troy’s, the lies of convenience by which he had stripped Khrushchev of his hostility and vulgarity. He was, he realised, a part of history. His lies were now lies of record. Oh, the accursed vice of lying. Troy threw back the covers and yawned his way to the bathroom.

Under the oaks at the bottom of the kitchen garden he found a large, fat man seated on the makeshift bench of planks and oil drums, sipping tea from a thermos flask. When Troy had first met him he had seemed merely big. He was bald too, but his baldness had not altered—there was nowhere for it to go; his growing girth, however, had forced Troy to reappraise him from big to fat. He still wore, as so many of the British did, the shabby remains of his wartime uniform. All over Britain on Saturday and Sunday mornings shades of blue and khaki could be seen on the backs of digging men on allotments or peeping out from the bonnets of old bangers in back yards. It had become, by dint of durability, the mufti of the working man. There seemed to be not a dustman in England without his khaki blouse. The Fat Man had put leather cuffs and elbows onto the dark blue serge of his old LCC Heavy Rescue battledress, though Troy doubted very much whether he could still fasten it, but these details apart he looked scarcely different from the night when Troy had first encountered him in the gloom of the blackout, tending his large white sow in the heart of Chelsea. These days you could search Chelsea from river to square, the length of the King’s Road from the Royal Court to World’s End, and find not a trace of a pig.

‘Mornin’ cock,’ he said as Troy wandered over.

Troy had never known him to use names, his own or anyone else’s, a habit which had made him, on occasion, hard to keep track of. He had always told Troy, with a tap of the finger to the side of the nose, that he worked for an amateur detective, ‘a gentleman, like’. Troy took this with a pinch of salt. The Fat Man would disappear from time to time and occasionally Troy would wonder what became of him, but he always showed up at the punctuation points in the calendar of a pig’s life, and Troy had long since given up asking him questions. He would, after all, only resort to ‘ask no questions, you’ll be told no lies’, or some such phrase, which irritated Troy intensely, so reminiscent were they of childhood.

Troy leaned over the side of the sty. The large Gloucester Old Spot sow was scarcely visible in the shade of the tree, well camouflaged by the natural black and white of her markings and the odd splash of mud. She grunted a greeting. Troy could just make her out, sitting on her haunches, rolling her head at the sky in anticipation of the coming sunshine.

‘I’s’ll ’ave ’er put to the boar next month,’ the Fat Man said. ‘We should get a good litter this year. She’s in the pink of condition.’

Troy sat next to him on the planks and declined the offer of sickly sweet, milky tea.

Troy had sought him out to get his advice on building the pens and breeding pigs. One hot summer day in 1953 he had roared up the drive on his motorcycle combination, still in his blue jacket, wearing goggles and a leather helmet. In the sidecar sat a patient, self-possessed pig, a large specimen of the Middle White. It, too, wore a leather flying helmet.

Troy had stood in the porch with Sasha watching the bike approach. It ground to a halt in a spurt of gravel. The Fat Man pushed up the goggles and beamed at Troy.

‘Wotcher, cock,’ he said as though they had last met only yesterday.

Sasha drifted over to the bike, walked slowly round it, delicately, barefoot on the gravel, feigning appraisal. At last she said, ‘Who’s your friend?’

‘Randolph,’ the Fat Man said.

‘Randolph?’

‘Randolph. On account of his father was called Winston.’

Sasha corpsed. A fit of girlish giggles. The Fat Man did not, clearly, see the naming of pigs as a source of mirth. He looked stonily at her doubled up with laughter. The pig, for its part, continued to roll a pebble round in its mouth, its eyes narrowed to slits, staring straight ahead, oblivious to her hysterics, listening to the sound the pebble made on its teeth. For all Troy knew, what sounded like utter monotony to him might well have been music to the pig.

‘’Ere,’ the Fat Man said to Troy, ‘is she taking the mick?’

‘Most of the time she does little else,’ said Troy.

‘Right, Randolph. Time to show ’er your stuff!’

He plucked the leather flying helmet from the pig’s head, and the porker leapt from the sidecar and put his nose to the ground. He sniffed a second or two and was off.

‘What’s happening?’ Sasha cried.

The pig had the acceleration of an MG. He had almost reached a gallop and was approaching the corner of the house with the Fat Man in hot pursuit.

‘Come on,’ he yelled over his shoulder to Troy. ‘Shake a leg! Or we’ll lose the bugger!’

Troy looked from the Fat Man to Sasha. She was clutching the hem of her skirt and hopping madly from one foot to the other.

‘I’ve nothing on my feet!’ she squealed, desperate at the thought that she would be left out of anything.

‘My wellies are behind the door,’ Troy said.

He took off after the pig and the Fat Man, already vanishing around the corner. The pig had a head start on them, but Troy soon drew level with the Fat Man.

‘What are we doing?’ he gasped.

The Fat Man wheezed and creaked and spoke in rapid snorts.

‘We’re fmding the pig spot.’

‘What’s a pig spot?’

‘The best place to build a pig pen, old cock.’

‘How do we know it when we find it?’

‘Simple. The pig stops. We stop. When yer pig finds his spot he’ll stop. Either he finds something worth eating or he knackers himself. Either way he stops. And that’s where we builds ’is little piggy ’ouse.’

Randolph was out of sight, darting between the greenhouses and the cold frames. From behind them came a shrill ‘View halloo’. Troy turned his head to his sister galloping after them in outsize wellington boots, skirts tucked into her knickers to keep them free of the mud.

‘Mind you,’ said the Fat Man, ‘a good pig in his prime can run you ragged. I’ve known Randolph give you a right round the ’ouses when ’e’s a mind to. I ’ope that mad woman as appears to live with you ’as got the energy to keep up. He’ll do for me in a couple of rounds. If he starts circling the ’ouse I’s’ll sit it out and nab ’im on another lap.’

Sasha’s cries were getting closer. Windows were going up in the house. He saw Rod lean out, heard him yell, ‘What the bloody hell is going on?’

‘A pig! A pig!’ cried Sasha, as though this alone would suffice as explanation.

The pig doubled back on Troy, caught him in the narrow corridor between two greenhouses, pigdozed him aside and headed back to the house. One circuit of the house and the Fat Man, true to his word, decided to sit it out, pulled forth a large white handkerchief and sat on the edge of the verandah, mopping his brow. Two, and Troy joined him, leaving only Sasha to keep up the chase. She and the pig orbited the house, she squawking and hooting, the pig threatening at any moment to lap her and pursue the pursuer.

‘Has she been barmy long, then?’ the Fat Man asked.

‘Don’t ask,’ Troy replied. ‘By the way, I have very bad news for you. There’s two of them.’

‘Eh?’

‘Twins,’ said Troy.

Troy pushed the Fat Man to one side as Randolph came hurtling across the verandah and shot between them.

‘Right,’ said the Fat Man, lumbering to his feet. ‘This looks like it.’

The pig disappeared southwards.

Down by the oaks, a couple of hundred yards from the house, Troy found Randolph snuffling among layers of dead oak leaves and digging vigorously with his front feet. Was this the pig spot?

Sasha came bounding up, well ahead of the Fat Man, speechless with giggles, capable only of hooting, ‘A pig! A pig!’ She drew a deep breath and at her third attempt managed a short, full sentence.

‘Has the pig come to stay?’

‘No. He’s a breeding boar. To be honest, I don’t know why he’s come.’

A wheezing Fat Man came slowly down the slope. ‘I might’ve known,’ he said. ‘Haycorns.’

‘Wrong time of year,’ said Troy.

‘Nah, ’e’s diggin’ for last year’s, buried under all that leafmould.’

He gazed up at the spreading branches of the great oak tree.

‘So this is it, eh? This is where you wants yer piggy ’ouse, is it?’

The pig snuffled and dug and ignored him.

‘Is an oak tree the best spot?’ Troy asked.

‘It’ll do. Shady, doesn’t have to walk far, food just drops off the tree to him. On the other hand, if you doesn’t want a pig livin’ right under yer tree, you just picks a bit o’ waste land, like them brambles over there, and you tosses in an ’andful of haycorns, and yer average porker’ll turn it over for you better than two horses and a plough.’

So saying he took a few acorns from his jacket pocket and tossed them among the mass of nettle and blackberry. The pig gave up his dig and tore into the brambles with his trotters, slashing away with a demonic ferocity.

‘And when ’e’s through, all you ’as ter do is put up a sty and bob’s yer uncle.’

‘That’s it?’ said Troy. ‘That’s how you find a pig spot? It all seems a bit arbitrary to me. You could just start off by throwing the acorns into the brambles and not bother chasing the damn pig all around the garden.’

The Fat Man looked hurt, suddenly deadly serious. A sharp intake of breath, a shake of the head, as though Troy were defying ancient pig lore that might be almost sacred to him. He stared at the ground a while and then looked up at Troy.

‘But then you’d miss all the fun,’ he said.

That had been three years ago. The Fat Man still regarded Sasha with great suspicion, and never referred to her by any other name but ‘the mad woman’. Masha—when he was certain it was her—he was scrupulously polite to. But then she hardly ever went near the pig pens anyway. He acknowledged the fact of twins with a degree of doubt, much of it due to Troy’s too-often repeated assertion that they were one dreadful woman with two bodies. Today he and Troy sat on the plank bench and followed the pig’s example in looking at the sun.

‘Are you goin’ to say anythin’? Or shall I drink up me tea and go home?’

‘Sorry,’ Troy said. ‘Things on my mind.’

‘What you should have on yer mind is muckin’ out. A mornin’ shovellin’ pigs’ doins should take yer mind off whatever it is.’

He was right. And in the afternoon, following lunch outdoors, they walked down through the village, cut a five-mile circle through the leafing woods and came back to the house from the north in a bobbing sea of bluebells and an unearthly tangle of uncurling spleenwort. They chatted about nothing much; the Fat Man was a committed cockney and Troy doubted that he could tell Love-in-a-Mist from Hole-in-the-Head, but he added to Troy’s knowledge of pig lore, and Troy thought the old man made most of it up and minded not one bit—and he told Troy what he thought of Arsenal’s performance this season, a subject of which Troy knew no more than he did of cricket. And at the end of it Troy returned home feeling pleasantly sane, delightfully buffeted by the inanities of a normal conversation. It was an art so difficult in his own household, so far were the Troys from normal. Their father’s legacy; his character, split up so oddly among them, and none of them easy, normal people. Rod, inheritor of the old man’s political earnestness, his journalistic nose. The Sisters, heirs to the mercurial, whimsical, self-indulgent side of his nature—a man who could crack jokes in five languages, who could be reduced to hysterics often by the slightest thing—oddly crossed with their mother’s stern humourlessness, evident on the days when nothing would make them see the joke. And Troy—what had he inherited? Troy knew full well. The tendency to secrecy. The habit of playing his cards close to his chest. Put together with the nosiness of a journalist, it was what made him a copper, but it was also the source of the very problem from which pig and pigman had so pleasurably distracted him.

Rod, too, seemed to have recovered his form. He entertained them all over dinner with his account of events in Westminster—a wicked caricature of Macmillan announcing a thing he called a Premium Bond, a lottery by any other name. The very way Rod said ‘orf’ reduced the twins to giggling heaps. They cackled like demented hags when he screwed up his face and imparted to his eyes the sad slant of an old bloodhound.

Troy looked at the one in-law present—Lucinda, Lady Troy. Laughing quietly, a delightful, shy smile, the bright blue eyes in the pale face. Neither Hugh nor Lawrence, Masha’s husband, had come for the weekend. So often these days Lucinda was the only outsider present. If nothing else it ensured that they spoke English. Russian evenings bored Troy with the sense of their exclusivity, the retreat into a private language. Rod had married Lucinda in 1936, the year of the three kings. She was about the same age as the girls. Troy thought he had a good relationship with her—she had none of the girls’ tendency to bully, and none of that preordained idea that he was inevitably ‘younger’ and hence disqualified from judgement for the rest of his life. He had often envied Rod the choice, the step towards normality he had made. The choice of an indisputably English woman.

Suddenly, as they were finishing the last course, Sasha was on her feet announcing she must dash, trying to be home before the pumpkin got her. And the meal, and with it the evening, dissolved around her. Rod had papers he must read before bedtime, Masha’s favourite programme was on the goggle-box in the yellow room. There was half a bottle of Pouilly-Fumé ’52 left in the ice bucket.

‘Shall we finish it?’ he said to Lucinda.

‘I’d love to, Freddie,’ said the indisputably English woman, ‘but I’m worn out. I didn’t know Sasha was going to cut and run, but now that she has I’d rather like an early night.’ She yawned. ‘I seem to have spent so many nights sitting up listening to Rod get his speech right, or waiting up for him to come in after a division. Sorry.’

Troy took the bottle out of the bucket, grabbed his coat from the hall stand and walked through his father’s old study to the south verandah. It was still not yet May. The day had lost its warmth. He slipped on the coat, sat on a creaking wicker chair and finished the bottle in natural silence—the mechanical clatter of a pheasant, the distant bark of a dog-fox, the wind, gently, in the willows. The willows divided the garden from the river and were overhanging badly. He had put off pollarding them last year, and as they vanished from sight into the encroaching night, he knew he could not put it off again. He loved the sweeping shape of wild willow—a pollarded willow was always a squat thing, with too regular an array of branches, but if left they would split down the middle and die.

In the deepening gloom a pair of bats began to criss-cross the lawn at first-floor height, cutting the night into invisible squares, in search of prey Troy could not even see. As one cut in from the north, the second would come in from the west, missing each other with unerring accuracy, with scarcely a flutter of the skinny wing, weaving the warp and weft of their nightly pattern.

He sat until the darkness was complete and his hands turned numb with cold. Looking back, he would come to think of it as the last peace he would ever know. In the morning the warp and weft of one life began to tear themselves apart and thread themselves into the matted conspiracy of another.

§19

He was taking coffee alone in his father’s study, scanning the Sunday papers for any admissions by Her Majesty’s Government that bore out what Rod had told him. He sat in his father’s chair, facing the window. For a while after the old man had died he had sat on the other side of the partners desk, facing into the room—his father’s pen and blotter exactly as he had left them—giving in to some fearful sense that it was a form of sacrilege to occupy his place. Then, one day, he had thought, sod it, the view’s better, moved around to the other side, and gave the matter no more thought. Today, for no reason that was immediately apparent, Masha appeared, perched on the edge of the desk, put her feet on his father’s chair, helped herself from the cafetière and smiled her sweethag’s smile.

Troy said nothing. They sipped coffee in silence. He waited to see if the visit had any purpose.

The telephone rang. He picked it up and heard his brother-in-law Hugh asking if he could speak to his wife.

‘Sasha?’ Troy said, puzzled, and before he could say a word more the phone was snatched from his hand.

‘Hughdey,’ Masha crooned. Only Sasha ever called Hugh Hughdey. ‘Darling. [Pause.] Yes, darling. [Pause.] I’ll be back after lunch, I should think.’

There was a longer pause. Troy could hear the Bakelite crackle, the baritone rasp of Hugh’s voice, without being able to make out a word of what he was saying.

‘Oh,’ Masha resumed. ‘Nothing special. Lucinda came down too, so it was dinner en famille.’

She paused again.

‘Yes. After lunch.’

She blew him a smacking kiss and hung up.

Troy stared in near-disbelief.

‘Does Sasha provide the same service for you?’ he said.

‘Don’t ask.’

‘Do you think he’ll fall for that?’

‘Well—he always has in the past.’

‘Hugh isn’t a complete fool, you know.’

‘Wanna bet?’ said Masha.

§20

Onions rang forty minutes later.

‘Pack a suitcase. You’re booked on the night sleeper to Aberdeen.’

‘A juicy one?’ Troy asked.

‘Arsenic. Four bodies. Same MO, and the locals are stumped.’

This appealed. He had not had a good body in a while. He had not investigated a poisoning for about five years, and now the prospect of four at once.

‘What about the squad?’

He heard Onions sigh deeply. The squad was under strength. When Troy had told Khrushchev’s apparatchik that he ran the Murder Squad, he had clipped the truth. He was its acting head in the absence of Superintendent Tom Henrey. But Tom had been absent since Christmas.

‘I doubt Tom’ll be back,’ Onions said at last. ‘It’s cancer of the pancreas. But until he tells me one way or the other, to relieve him of the job permanently seems like piling it on—like I was hurrying him into the grave.’

‘Of course,’ Troy said. ‘I’m not asking to be promoted, but I think we have to get someone else in lower down the ladder, as soon as we can.’

‘I’d be hard pressed to give you another inspector.’

‘A sergeant will do.’

‘Anyone in mind?’

‘Yes,’ said Troy. ‘Clark, Edwin Clark. Warwickshire Constabulary, currently with Birmingham CID.’

Onions thought for a second.

‘OK. You’re on. I’ll get Sergeant Clark transferred.’

‘Constable Clark.’

‘Eh?’

‘He’s a constable now. He’ll be a sergeant once he’s on the squad.’

‘God, you ask a lot. Is he up to it?’

‘Of course he’s up to it. In fact, he may be just what we need. A solid anchor man, someone who’s good with paperwork.’

‘It’d be nice to set foot in your office and be able to see young Wildeve. Lately the pile of paper’s been bigger than him.’

Troy knew he would have no difficulty justifying Clark’s presence. A fortnight with him left alone to pervade the office with his unrufflable calm and his methodical, military efficiency and Onions would soon appreciate him—and the contrast in temperament between such a cool customer and two men as volatile as Troy and Wildeve.

§21

Aberdeen took longer than he or Onions had guessed. When Troy stepped from the overnight sleeper into the dusty morning light under the arches of King’s Cross railway station in early June, he had been gone the best part of six weeks. London had roared into summer.

He was feeling that curious mixture of the contentment of success and the niggling doubt of a loose end. The murders had indeed been arsenic, but the mistake that had thrown the Aberdonians was in presuming a common modus operandi. Troy had seen at once that this was not the case. The four doses of the poison had been administered in wildly differing quantities, and the emergence of a fifth body two days after Troy had arrived only added to the spread of evidence. They were not looking for a murderer, he had told them, but for several murderers. His task had been to redirect the team, to rake over the evidence accumulated in the best part of a year, to interview all over again those potential suspects who had not fitted the previous assumptions about the case.

It had been a long haul, days without break, often starting at break of day. Occasionally he would pick up a newspaper and scan it quickly. Egypt still simmered, Cyprus still bled and the Government made no admissions about the Portsmouth spy. The press made endless speculation, particularly those papers owned by the Troys, and Troy knew that some of that speculation was being fed to them by Rod. The mysterious spy had gone missing, or he was not really working for the Secret Service at all but had been hired by the right-wing Empire mob/the left-wing anti-Soviet Trots/the White Russian exiles/the Zionists, or he had been kidnapped and was now in Russia, or he had died on the job and was now at the bottom of the Solent—perm any two of three, delete as appropriate. He had no time to follow the story in depth, but then, he thought, the only depth the story had was that in which this mysterious frogman spy might be buried.

He had gained a confession to two of the murders from the victims’ own family doctor; the local inspector had managed the same with the brother of the second victim; the team as a whole had built a case against a third man for the fourth murder that Troy was certain would convict him in court—but the fifth case he could not solve, and he returned to London trailing behind him the thread of his first failure in several years, much inclined to write it down to imitation, the copycat syndrome as he believed the Americans were now calling it. There was a lesson to be learnt in keeping some things out of the papers. It was, he concluded, a loose thread that was unlikely to be tugged in the near future. At the earliest he would be yanked back to Scotland at the end of the summer to give evidence in court.

It was seven o’clock in the morning. A fine summer morning. The sun coursed down the Pentonville Road, over the rooftops of Islington and Clerkenwell to pick out the magnificence of St Pancras’ Midland Hotel in all its grime and glory. London was waking up. Two million kettles sang on hobs. He threw his case in the back of a cab. After coffee and a bath he was quite looking forward to walking to the Yard.

The old Ascot Patent Gas Water Heater perched on its iron bracket above the bath worked well enough if you knew the knack. Begin in the bathroom. A small trickle will emerge from the nozzle. Turn knob fully counterclockwise. Run downstairs, wallop pipe next to sink with heel of shoe, held firmly in left hand. Run upstairs, turn knob half-clockwise, press button to ignite. Go to airing cupboard on landing, wallop pipe at back of cupboard with shoe, held firmly in left hand. Return to bathroom, trickle will now be a lukewarm, modest flow. Disrobe. Lukewarm, modest flow has now become hot, generous flow. Get in bath. Flow cuts out at four inches of hot water in obedience to World War II guidelines.

Troy had no idea why his Ascot had never got over the war. So much of England had not, after all, and it might well be a simple matter of the machine’s sympathies, but after this rigmarole nothing would induce him to answer the telephone. It rang as he settled into the bath, and it rang again five minutes later. He stood his mug of coffee and his slice of toast and marmalade on the soap rack and lay back in the suds. A gentle kick with his foot on the up pipe and the Ascot would yield a second harvest to create something resembling a decent bathful. It just required a little patience. Whoever it was on the phone could go to hell.

He sipped at his first good cup of coffee in weeks, and was strongly reminded of Larissa Tosca, of her utter immodesty which led her to hold court in the bath, of him perched awkwardly on the loo while she sank into foam like a Hollywood starlet in a musical comedy. Bath nights had never been the same since.

The walk to the Yard was pleasant beyond all his anticipation. There were days when he loved London; there were days when it sparkled through the grime, and one could be seduced by the lie that fog and winter were not its natural condition.

He scarcely recognised his office. It was neat and clean and orderly. Someone had emptied the waste paper bin. Someone had cleared that pile of files off the floor and filed them. Someone had unjammed the window to let the breeze in off the river along with the odd toot of the traffic. Someone had taken down years’ old notices from the board. Someone had wound the clock. Someone had replaced the broken chair with one of those swivel things that glamorous secretaries sit on while they hoik up their skirts and take dictation. And the desks. Jack’s desk was almost bare. His own was stacked with papers, but a small, far from glamorous, stout little body was sitting in his chair calmly working his way through them, sorting the urgent from the routine, occasionally annotating, he presumed for his, Troy’s, future benefit. It made no sense. Had they fired him in absentia and replaced him with a real policeman? Was he one of the three bears? Was this the fat version of Goldilocks?

‘Good morning, sir,’ said the stout little body.

Clark. It was Clark. He’d quite forgotten about Clark.

‘I bet you could use a cup of coffee, couldn’t you, sir?’

Before Troy could say that he’d just had a cup and that nothing short of desperation would induce him to drink Scotland Yard coffee, his eye was caught by a contraption on the corner cupboard, next to the gas fire. It seemed to consist of a Bunsen burner, several glass flasks, a yard or two of glass and rubber tubing and a large, round condenser from which a deep brown liquid appeared to be dripping into a beaker.

‘Do you like it, sir? I designed it myself.’

‘Like it? I don’t even know what it is.’

‘It’s a coffee machine, sir.’

Troy looked at the bubbling glass maze. Piranesi could not have bettered the design. He inhaled deeply. It was coffee, and it smelt rather good. Better than the stuff he made himself.

‘Where did you get the apparatus?’ he asked as Clark poured him a cup.

‘From Forensics, sir.’

‘You mean Kolankiewicz parted with half a ton of his clobber to let you make coffee?’

‘Not exactly, sir. I requisitioned it with a chitty.’

‘A chitty?’

‘Yes, sir. I find that if you catch Mr Wildeve when he’s trying to leave, particularly if you already know from his diary that he’s got a date for the evening, he’ll sign almost anything without reading it.’

This was bad news. This was pretty much how Troy got Onions to sign chitties. It was all a matter of knowing when Stan had arranged to play bowls or dig his allotment. It did not bode well. How many scoundrels could fit into a single office?

‘You’re not back to your old fiddles, are you, Eddie?’

‘Well, sir. I paid for the coffee. Besides, if you lived in the Police House you’d make your office as comfortable as you could. A home from home, if you like.’

‘Is that where they put you?’

‘Just till I can find a place of my own, sir. I’ll be a few quid a week better off when I get my first sergeant’s pay packet. I might be able to afford a small flat somewhere, you never know.’

Troy was not sure whether this was a tip of the hat from Clark acknowledging his promotion or another episode in the great British whinge. Promotion meant about thirty shillings a week to Clark, Troy estimated, still leaving him short of five hundred pounds per annum. It might be enough to set him up in a place of his own. It might not. It wasn’t a great sum. Troy himself earned the maximum allowed to a Metropolitan Chief Inspector, less than a travelling salesman, and well short of the social yardstick of one thousand pounds per annum—the enviable ‘thousand a year man’—but then he had never lived off his salary and had never had to. Clark had a point. A single man would not be anyone’s priority in London’s struggle to house its people in the battered buildings the Blitz had left standing.

‘Is there anything I should know about?’ he said, pointing at the pile of paperwork.

‘Half a dozen things you should read. Nothing that can’t wait. Though this might amuse you.’

He handed Troy a copy of the Police Gazette, folded open at the promotions and transfers page.

‘J Division has a new DDI, sir.’

Troy read the short piece announcing ‘the appointment of Detective Sergeant Patrick Milligan as Divisional Detective Inspector, J Division, based at Leman St., London E1, following the death of DDI Horace Jago’. Leman Street had been Troy’s first station twenty years ago.

‘That’s quite a promotion,’ he said. ‘Who would ever have thought he had it in him?’

‘I don’t think Mr Cobb brought out the best in Paddy, sir.’

‘My recollection is that he was asleep half the time, and the other half he was scheming ways to get even with Cobb.’

‘Weren’t we all, sir? Oh, by the way, your brother’s been trying to reach you all morning.’

‘Urgent?’

‘I wouldn’t know, sir.’

Troy called his brother. Next to the phone was a copy of The Times, folded open at its daily crossword. It was nine-thirty in the morning and Clark had already finished it.

‘What’s up?’

‘I’ve a treat for you,’ Rod said. ‘Can you meet me in forty minutes?’

‘I’ve got a fortnight’s leave due to me. I’ll be at Mimram tomorrow morning. Couldn’t it wait till then?’

‘No. It’s special.’

‘Rod—’

‘Just meet me. Won’t take long.’

‘At your office?’

‘No. At the Post. Lawrence is making an announcement.’

In 1945 Rod had called the family together. He could not, he said, take responsibility for the family businesses and be an MP. Whatever the rules said, he could not and would not do it. Did they, he mooted, wish to get out of the business of Fleet Street and sell the lot? No, was the chorus answer. It would be selling everything the old man had put together. To Troy’s surprise his brother-in-law Lawrence, still in uniform himself, stepped into the breach and offered to run the Sunday Post. He had no experience of such work; he had been a barrister when he married Masha, had spent a frustrating war wearing the red flashes of a staff officer, had never in fact seen combat or set foot on foreign soil. He was, he said privately to Troy, itching for a challenge. And he had risen to it. The Post was now the most contentious Sunday paper in the country, and Lawrence the most litigious, cantankerous, campaigning editor. All in all a man pretty much like their father. Rod might be right, it might be worth hearing. It might be another of those occasions like the time when Lawrence accused Attlee of selling out his principles after he had imposed charges on the National Health Service to pay for Britain’s part in the Korean War. Or the time when he had personally signed an editorial calling for Churchill’s resignation on grounds of senility. Subscriptions all over Britain had been cancelled. Ex-colonial colonels and mad majors had written in in droves and patriots bunged half-bricks though his windows. Lawrence had his moments.

§22

The lobby of the Sunday Post was full of grumbling hacks complaining yet again of the absurd vanity of Lawrence calling a press conference. The other newspapers might have sent their trainees and their has-beens, but they would not ignore Lawrence, and the chance of another row. There was at least an inch or two of column space in reporting the antics of the competition. They cliqued unto themselves, talking shop, but then so did the other faction present.

London was a city of exiles. Here and there, statistical probability implied, there might just be the odd refugee from the fall of the Second Empire. Some nonagenarian brought across the Channel in childhood. The Empress Eugénie herself had lived on in Chislehurst on the southern edge of London into the 1920s. But Russians fleeing their revolution, London had had aplenty in its time and, it seemed, every living London Russian exile Troy had ever met or even heard of, including several he had thought long dead, was there. They were not a pleasant bunch. The last scions of displaced and dying lines, the final bearers of ancient and occasionally bogus titles, the last believers unwilling to recognise the course history had taken, not-so-old men who still thought the storming of the Winter Palace might be undone, that Ekaterinburg might not have happened after all. As a rule, he avoided them.

The USSR was the fine line of the century. Its most heated topic, from the old guard of diehard monarchists to the fellow-travellers of the thirties. Though both were thin on the ground these days, there was still a peculiar species of egghead who could bore for Britain on the subject of the Soviet Union at the drop of a hat. It was the most attacked, the most defended, and the most mythic country on earth, that about which we knew least and talked most. People turned out for Russia.

‘If this lot are meant to be indicative of the tone or content of this hullaballoo,’ Troy said, ‘I’m leaving now. It’s beginning to look like a freak show. I take it Lawrence has dug up some new scandal on the USSR? And the gathering of the clans is meant to celebrate the cocking up of another Five Year Plan or something equally silly?’

‘Bear with me,’ said his brother. ‘There’s more to it than a handful of old fools and clapped-out hacks.’

At the back of the room Troy caught sight of one of the few people he would still listen to on the matter of the Soviet Union. Seated on a foldaway chair, Homburg far back on his head, eyes closed as though snatching a nap mid-morning, was his Uncle Nikolai, Troy’s father’s younger brother. The last of the Troitsky brothers, and the only one to accompany Troy’s father to England. He looked old to Troy, though he could not say with any certainty how old he was.

The old man’s consistent opposition to all Russian regimes, from Nicholas II to Lenin and Stalin, to Khrushchev and Bulganin, had enabled him to keep intact his wartime role as British Intelligence’s man on ships and planes and bombs and rockets, right into the peace, and right past his retirement, despite his obvious Anarchist leanings. He received a ‘clearance’ that was in all probability denied to Troy, a serving copper, and to Rod, a former Government minister, and if the Tories blew the election in 1960, he’d most certainly be the next Foreign Secretary. Nikolai had given up his chair in Applied Physics at Imperial College, but hung onto his office and a fellowship, hung onto his advisory role. Nobody knew more about ships and planes and bombs and rockets; his mind was an attic cluttered with the dust of these horrors. A mind that was much like his father’s—Troy’s grandfather’s—tending to dust off the attic at unexpected moments and wheel out something arcane, to interrupt a conversation with a diversionary tack—the wooden horse of physics, the abandoned rag doll of pre-Soviet history. His grandfather would suddenly burst with nostalgia and reminiscence, bringing meals and conversations to a juddering halt. Even Troy’s father, Alexei Rodyonovich, that garrulous piss artist, could be silenced by unanswerable interjections from the elder generation, a Slavic rumble from deep in the enveloping beard and tunic. Nikolai was more focused, arcane it might be, or amusing, or important, or deadly accurate. He had the unsparing knack of putting lives to rights in a sentence or two without even recourse to ‘you know what your trouble is?’ Troy added it silently to many things the old man threw at them, and he was pretty sure Rod did the same.

Troy felt Rod nudge him. Lawrence had appeared in front of the lectern and was waving for silence with a piece of paper, Chamberlain-style.

‘For many weeks now, we have all of us been hearing rumours, emanating from the Soviet Union, concerning a secret speech made at the Twentieth Party Congress by Nikita Khrushchev. Details of this speech have been speculated upon since February, and I think I speak for Fleet Street when I say that it is now widely believed that Khrushchev used this secret session to denounce Stalin. I can tell you now that this is true.’

Somewhere in the ranks of the cognoscenti a raspberry was blown, and a second voice said simply ‘Big deal’. This was hardly news.

‘I can tell you,’ Lawrence went on, ‘because I have obtained a copy of the speech.’

No one sneered. The press ranks exploded with cries of ‘How?’, ‘Where from?’

Lawrence carried on regardless. He had their attention now. They’d all been upstaged and they knew it.

‘From, shall I say, sources overseas.’

Lawrence had a simple code. Russia itself would be ‘unnamed sources’, a contrived British leak would be ‘friendly sources’, and the US was always ‘sources overseas’. So, Lawrence had a nark in the State Department? This should not surprise the hacks. What was surprising was that this should be Khrushchev’s way of leaking the truth. Who did he have in the State Department? It was a neat trick—it had in-built deniability. Khrushchev could leak it and deny it at the same time. Lawrence’s sense of theatrical timing gave the hacks a minute or two of hubbub before he closed in for the kill.

‘The full text will be published in the Post this Sunday. All 26,000 words of it. In the meantime I can tell you something of the atrocities denounced by Khrushchev. There are some truly shocking revelations. I think we have known for some long time now that history is unlikely to offer a larger rollcall of the dead. Khrushchev does not deal in figures. Indeed I doubt that we or he will ever know the full carnage of the Yezhovshchina, but he deals in methods and principles—the methods of Stalin’s madness and the principles of his paranoia.’

Lawrence rattled on. Troy looked at Rod. His face said, ‘I told you so,’ and his lips formed the words seconds after Troy had read them in his eyes.

‘Told me what?’

‘It’s a hoot. It’s a coup.’

‘No it’s not.’

‘How so? It means Khrushchev was serious about peaceful coexistence. Or are you going to insult me in your habitual fashion and tell me that “he’s just another politician”?’

‘Worse, Rod. He’s an actor.’

‘Eh?’

‘I saw a wee bit more of the man than you did, and take it from me, he’s Grimaldi and Alec Guinness rolled into one.’

Lawrence was almost through with his press-tease, saying nothing and something at the same time, and he ended by quoting Khrushchev’s own words.

‘“Comrades, we must abolish the cult of the individual decisively, once and for all.” And if you want any more, you’ll have to buy the Post. Thank you, gentlemen.’

Lawrence stepped down to half-hearted applause, beaming with pleasure. He had pulled off a coup, stuck one to the rest of Fleet Street en masse, and he knew it. Every editor on the street would have killed for that speech. Most of them would run it in full just as Lawrence was doing, revelling in the showmanship, knowing full well that not one reader in fifty would get halfway through it. Troy made a mental note to buy the News of the World instead. Comrade K could not compete with tits and bums and wayward vicars, the rightful, the traditional subjects of the English Sunday papers, as British as the fish and chips they would be wrapping by next Tuesday.

From behind them Troy heard a sigh that seemed to bear the weight of history on its breath, an infinite weariness, the like of which Troy had not heard since the days of his grandfather. It could only be Nikolai. They both turned at the same time. Rod and Troy looked at their uncle, his head resting on the wall, the brow of his Homburg pointing skyward, his eyes looking up to the heaven in which he surely did not believe.

‘Nikolai,’ Rod said, softly, with caution. ‘Are you all right?’

‘I am fine, my boy,’ he said without looking at either of them. ‘It is you and yours I fear for, not myself. Stalin is dead—long live Stalin.’

‘Eh?’ said Rod for both of them. It struck Troy as the most logical response he could make.

‘Do you know why Khrushchev will not enumerate the Soviet Book of the Dead? Do you know why he will not add up the millions upon millions? Do you know what this man did in the first years after the war?’

The question did not seem to either of them to require an answer.

‘Stalin regarded anyone who had allowed themselves to be captured by the Germans as a traitor. He ordered returning prisoners of war to be interrogated, and an arbitrary number of them to hanged. Guilty or innocent, he did not care; but enough should be hanged to let the people know the power of their leader. This man, Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, hanged his fellow countrymen in countless numbers. His denunciation of the monster Stalin comes ten years too late to be believed.’

In the midst of the hubbub, the room-filling buzz of ardent hacks whose hands had quickly tired of clapping, there opened up a silence which seemed to engulf the three of them.

‘There’s no such thing,’ Rod said gently. ‘It can never be too late. Khrushchev has done now what was right. Regardless of what he might have done in the past.’

Again the heaven-bound, world-weary, earth-sent sigh.

‘Regardless?’ he queried. ‘I find it impossible to disregard such things. What he did then is surely indicative of what he will do next. My country —our country, though I know you boys haff never seen it—has become a country of programmed change. Each change is a rewriting of the history of what has gone before. Each change has meant a new set of victims, a new herd of scapegoats to be staked out in the sun. Do you really think this will be different? Do you really think this is anything we haff not seen before? There may not be show trials—that, after all, would seem to run against the grain of what the man is saying—but for all that do you not think that heads will roll? That purges will surely follow, that there will once more be disposable people, that the little people will suffer? In sloughing off the guilt of a generation onto one man, Khrushchev has accepted the cult of personality even as he would seem to reject it. But the one man is dead so the burden will fall on those who served him. Little people.’

‘Apparatchiks,’ said Troy.

‘People,’ said Nikolai.

‘Apparatchiks,’ said Troy.

‘People like you and me. Little people, caught in the tide of a history they could neither make nor unmake.’

‘Don’t ask me to care about apparatchiks,’ Troy said, ignoring the slow pressure of Rod’s foot on his. ‘There’s nothing on earth could make me care.’

If nothing else, Troy had seized the old man’s attention. He had lowered his eyes from heaven and was looking at Troy with a deep sadness in his eyes.

‘Perhaps,’ Nikolai said slowly, ‘perhaps, they are not people like you and me. Perhaps I am wrong. What distinguishes us from them but the matter of choice? And if there was one thing your father’s genius did for us all, to say nothing of his money, it was that he gave us choice. Me as much as the two of you. These are people who know no choice. If I were Khrushchev’s head of KGB, I would not bank on collecting my pension, but if I’d been one of his apparatchiks, as you insist they are, under Joseph Stalin, I would now fear for my life. Believe me, heads will roll. This denunciation is but prelude to another purge. The dead will pile up in heaps uncountable yet again. This is not freedom. Your man is wrong about that. This is the false dawn before the new nightmare. We are a long way from freedom.’

Rod seemed flabbergasted, speechless, but had stopped treading on Troy’s foot in the vain hope of shutting him up.

‘You know,’ said Troy, picking his words brutally. ‘You might as well ask me to care about the fate of the guards at Auschwitz.’

Nikolai got to his feet, shrugged off Troy’s unanswerable remark. He made his way slowly, painfully, towards the door. He stopped. The very posture, the angle of his head and body, betrayed the action of memory at work. Then he turned and spoke, looking at them with a sad air of mourning about him, his voice scarcely audible.

‘I considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun: and behold the tears of the oppressed, and they had no comforter; and on the side of their oppressors there was power; but they had no comforter.’

The old man’s voice rose, the softness of tone vanishing in a burst of anger, hammering out the verse with a hard emphasis.

‘Wherefore I praised the dead which are already dead more than the living which are yet alive. Better is he than both they, which haff not yet been, who haff not seen the evil work that is done under the sun.’

Nikolai walked slowly out, leaning heavily on his walking stick, and did not look back.

‘Good God,’ said Rod. ‘What was that? Lear on the blasted heath?’

‘It was the Old Testament,’ Troy replied. ‘Don’t ask me which book. Even old atheists can’t escape their upbringing.’

‘Do you think we’ve upset him?’

‘Yes—but for once I don’t care. He can’t ask us to shed a tear for the jobsworths of Russia. I couldn’t give a damn about his apparatchiks any more than I could about all the spooks from Torquay to Timbuctoo and back again. And I cannot conceive of the force that could make me. He’s wrong, and that’s all there is to it.’

§23

He lunched with Inspector Wildeve, who yawned his way through canteen meat and two veg and seemed to hear very little of what Troy had to say. Troy did his best to sort out what mattered from what did not. Jack could complain till he was blue in the face about a workload that kept him from his bed until four in the morning, there was little Troy could do about that. With a fortnight’s leave due to him—the first since Christmas—he did not intend to let Jack’s whingeing deflect him from it. What mattered was that he had clicked with Clark, that Clark had significantly eased the workload of which he complained so bitterly. Indeed, towards the end of a bowl of canteen rice pud, and a cup of murky tea, Jack was willing to admit that his Yard duties had kept him at it until only midnight, after which he felt like some fun and had squandered sleep and salary in a West End nightclub. Jack had been slow growing up. He was thirty-six, a bachelor, and burning the candle at both ends, much as he had done when he and Troy first met nearly fifteen years ago. Troy was not sympathetic. He did not frequent the clubs of Soho, and only occasionally ventured into its pubs.

In the evening, on his way home, after a desk-clearing operation designed to leave him unmolested for the next fortnight by anything more demanding than a pig or a parsnip, he just fancied a pub, and a drink, just the one in each case. What he did not fancy was walking so much as twenty yards out of his way to find one. And so, eight-thirty found him pushing open the side door of the Salisbury.

The usual patrons of the Salisbury were out-of-work actors. Loud voices and sweeping gestures were the house style. On a bad night you had to fight your way in through a few dozen monologuing, name-dropping hams, and the occasional stage door Johnny waiting for the stage door to open in a couple of hours’ time. The man at the bar in the creased white shirt was singular in his stillness and silence. It was the doyen of stage door Johnnies—Johnny Fermanagh. Troy almost turned on his heel and walked out, but the poise of the man, the concentration in his stillness, stirred his curiosity. He walked over to the bar. Johnny stood with his palms on the bar, arms braced straight, head down, staring intently at an empty pint glass and a full shot glass of whisky. So, he was on beer and a shot. A textbook example of how to get roaring pissed in the shortest possible time.

Johnny did not move. Did not seem even to have noticed Troy.

‘What’s up?’ Troy said to the barman.

‘Don’t ask me. It’s been going on for more than an hour.’

‘What has?’

Before the barman could answer Johnny let out a strangled cry, his head shook and his right hand crept slowly out towards the glass of whisky, then with the speed of a hungry snake he knocked it back in one, slammed the glass back on the bar and groaned like a beast in pain.

‘Aaaaaghhhhhhh! Nya, nya, nya. Yeworrayeworrayeworra. Same again, Spike.’

The barman topped up both glasses. At last Johnny seemed to have noticed Troy.

‘Freddie, old horse. Stick around, I’ll be with you in a jiffy.’

He hitched up his shirt-sleeves by their silver armbands, pulled his tie down an extra inch or two to dangle at the third button and reassumed the pose. The face twitched a little as he sought composure, then the right hand aimed at the pint, sank it in a single, ten-second gulp, and once again he proceeded to stare at the shot glass.

Spike spoke confidentially to Troy. ‘Thing is, Mr Troy. He’ll eyeball it a while, then he’ll scream, then he’ll knock it back, and then he’ll look like it chokes him and order another. This is round four. Seconds out.’

‘Do you think there’s a point to it?’

‘Search me.’

Minutes passed. Troy could hear a ham in the back of the room doing what sounded like a bad impression of Robert Newton, punctuated by the constant clink of glasses and the ever-present cry of ‘Darling’. Johnny pulled back, still staring at the glass of whisky. Slowly he drew himself up into some sort of drunk’s dignity, and waved the glass away with his hand.

‘Done, done. Get thee behind me, single malt! Take it away. Take it away!’

‘Did I hear you right?’ said the barman.

Johnny reached up to the pegs and was slipping on his jacket.

‘Yes, yes. I’m through with the demon drink. Give it to one of these poor thesps. Drink it yourself. I don’t care.’

He turned his sights on Troy once more.

‘Tea, tea,’ he said. ‘Let’s go to your house and drink tea.’

‘On the slate, Johnny?’ the barman asked.

‘No,’ said Johnny. ‘No more slate. No more tick. No more mañana. Tell me the sum outstanding and I shall write you a cheque at once.’

He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a Mullins Kelleher chequebook, its cheques the size of a pocket handkerchief, its script a florid pre-war copperplate.

‘Twelve pounds, three shillings and ninepence, Johnny.’

Inwardly Troy winced. Who in their right mind would run up a bill that size just for booze? But Johnny wrote out a cheque, tore it off the stub as though he relished the sound, and presented it to Spike with a flourish.

‘Free,’ he said. ‘Free, free, free.’

He turned, aimed for the door and walked his drunkard’s crooked walk to the street. Troy followed, wondering what this could be about. Rather than giving booze away, it was Johnny’s habit to scrounge it off anyone with the price of a round. Troy did not think he’d ever seen him walk away from a full glass before.

‘There’s the rub,’ said Johnny. ‘The very point. The glass was full. I am not.’

They crossed St Martin’s Lane, into Goodwin’s Court and up to Troy’s front door.

‘Not full, perhaps, but pissed just the same,’ said Troy with his hand on the key.

‘Pissed, pissed—but hardly the same.’

‘Do I get a prize if I spot the difference?’

He let Johnny flop into an armchair while he put on the kettle. He could have his cup of char and then Troy would throw him out.

‘What are you up to?’ he asked as he poured.

Johnny pulled himself back from reverie, smiled, gazed into his cup and looked up at Troy, dark eyes lost in a messy forelock of black hair. He swept the hair from his eyes, a gesture Troy had seen his sister perform so many times.

‘Any fool can give up the booze when he’s sober.’

Not a bad point, thought Troy.

‘The trick is to give it up with a glass in front of you. If I can walk away and leave a glass on the bar, then I know I can go the whole damn hog. D’ye see?’

‘I see that it gets you tight of a Friday night, just like any other Friday night.’

‘It’s the only way, the only way. You order beer and a shot. You drink the beer. Only when you can leave the shot glass full and walk away with the beer inside you do you know that you’ve got willpower, and without willpower you’ve got bugger all.’

‘But you had to drink four pints to get there.’

‘Four pints and three shots of malt!’

‘Which is why you’re pissed.’

‘Absofuckinlutely. Pissed? Of course I’m pissed. But never again. That’s it. Finito!’

‘Drink your tea,’ Troy said.

Johnny sipped at his cup of Best Orange Pekoe and pulled a face.

‘I’m going to have to get used to this, aren’t I?’

‘You’ve made your bed,’ Troy said. ‘What puzzles me is why.’

‘Hmm,’ said Johnny.

‘Do you know I pulled your record from CRO a while back? Just to see how many times you’ve been done for Drunk and Disorderly.’

‘Go on. Amaze me.’

‘Fifty-seven times.’

‘I should copyright it. Sue the blokes who can the beans.’

Johnny thought his joke hilarious and disappeared into a drunken cackle.

‘Do you remember your first?’ Troy asked.

‘Could I forget it? November 1934. My first term at Oxford. Courtyard of Wadham. Climbed in late. Bit of a tussle with a porter. The beak fines me five bob for D & D, the college stings me for a guinea and reminds me I’m pissing all over traditions going back as far as my great-great-grandfather and blahdey blahdey blah.’

‘Instead,’ Troy went on, ‘you’ve set up a twenty-two-year tradition of reckless pissery.’

‘And now it’s over.’

Johnny pushed himself up from his seat. Propped himself up on the mantelpiece, breathing deeply and making an effort at sobriety. He stared into the wall only inches from his eyes.

‘If you’d had my old man, Freddie, you’d have been a piss artist too.’

‘What is it that makes you finally want to bury the old bugger now? He’s been dead eleven years.’

Johnny drew a deep breath. Turned to look at Troy.

‘The love of a good woman,’ he said.

The trouble with clichés is that they all begin as truth. Only excess of use ever leads one to think that they are other than true. Every so often, against the odds, someone will use one with a straight face, or a straight pen, and with a bit of luck and the wind behind them they will disinter the original truth long since buried. Troy knew he should not laugh—not so much as a snigger. Johnny, transparently, believed every word of his cliché. But what woman in her right mind, good or downright malevolent, would take on Johnny? Some title-grubbing, gold-digging hag who’d put up with a raving husband in exchange for being addressed as Marchion­ess? Some sorry-for-drunk self-martyring silly cow?

‘Might I ask who?’

‘Can’t tell you, o’ man. Wish I could, but I can’t.’

‘I see.’

‘Do you, Freddie? Do you?’

‘A married woman, I take it?’

‘Oh. You do see. How d’ye know?’

‘Just guessing.’

‘Give me a little while to get things sorted. I just need a while. Or truth to tell she needs a while, not me. Just to get sorted. Then I’ll tell you. I’d love to tell you now. But I can’t. It’s all over between her and her husband. They’ve been out of love for years. But she has to tell him, you see. She has to tell him. I can’t say anything until she does.’

A friend could say only one thing. And Troy was a friend, wasn’t he? This was how he had come to regard Johnny by a process of attrition. Frequency and familiarity wearing away hostility. The friend as furniture? A dozen variations, but only one essential thing for a friend to say. Two of them sprang readily to mind.

‘Well done, Johnny. Congratulations.’

Johnny smiled and blushed. He really seemed to be happy, far from his common condition.

‘I’m very happy, Freddie. She makes me happy. I haven’t felt like this since I was a boy.’

Troy envied this. He was never at all sure that he was happy. Certainly no other person made him happy.

‘And I wanted to ask you . . .’ Johnny let the sentence trail off. ‘I wanted to ask you . . . about Diana.’

Mentally Troy began to ease him out. As quickly as he could he would physically ease him towards the door, out into the courtyard, out into the street. Out.

‘About you . . . and Diana.’

‘Johnny. You and I have known each other for ten years.’

‘Have we?’

‘You came up to me in the Muleskinners’ Arms in the autumn of 1946. “I know you,” you said. “You’re the bloke that killed my sister.”’

‘Did I? I must have been out my skull. I’m most awfully sorry.’

‘Think nothing of it. It is, after all, true. I did kill your sister. I cannot change that. But ever since you have assumed, it has been implicit in your conversations with me, that Diana and I were lovers. I have never said any such thing. None the less you have assumed it. It is a fixture in your mind, much as, until tonight, you were a fixture in half the bars in Soho. Why now, Johnny? Why do you choose to ask me now?’

‘I have to know. Really, I have to know.’

Troy said nothing.

‘I have to know that . . . somebody else can feel as I do. I don’t want to think that this is a delusion peculiar to me. I’ve lived my life apart. Never been in the mill of things. A drunken lord, a music hall joke. There’s hardly ever been a dash of normality about me. I don’t know what’s real. I don’t know what I should feel. Only what I do. I’m left, after years of a bent existence, craving normality, about which I know bugger all, wishing to God I could grow up, straighten up, and fly right. And I don’t know if I’m the only man ever to feel this.’

This, Troy thought, was why we read novels and poetry. To know that what we thought and felt were not total solipsisms of the mind and heart.

‘Ask one of the marrieds, Johnny. We have plenty of friends who are married.’

‘Name one.’

Troy could not.

‘You can’t do it because we haven’t got ’em. Most people we know are like you and me. The marrieds paired off donkey’s years ago. Who sees them any more? Who among us keeps the company of married men? I have to know. I have to know that you can feel as I feel. Otherwise I’m stuck inside of it like a starfish in a glass paperweight. A world of my own. That’s the achievement of twenty-two years of reckless pissery. Help me, Freddie.’

Troy said nothing.